Cost-of-Living Crisis - The Value of Expense Management Automation

The cost-of-living crisis is present across Europe, with businesses and employees both feeling the pinch. Energy and food prices are rocketing, and many are even anticipating a recession as we go into 2023. In this blog, we’ll discuss how automation can help to ease expense management challenges amid the cost-of-living crisis, and how finance teams can implement the technology to set themselves up for success next year.

The frightening and volatile economy that we’re living in is placing money front of mind. In turn, budgets, business expenses, and salaries will all potentially become a big sticking point within the workplace. Especially when you consider employers who will be trying to make cutbacks to survive, while employees will be looking to increase their salaries as much as possible to cover the rising cost of everyday life.

This workplace tension is already beginning to put expense management processes under the spotlight. For example, what expense management policies need to be adjusted to account for the current environment and support employees? How can expense reimbursement timelines be shortened to ensure staff aren’t out of pocket? And how can finance teams ensure the eagerness to reimburse staff quickly doesn’t lead to errors?

In a recent survey, we asked decision-makers what the expense management landscape looked like in their business, including the challenges and their future goals. In this blog post, I’ll outline what those are, and why business process automation is fast-becoming critical to addressing the challenges that have arisen from the cost-of-living crisis.

How can expense management boost employee satisfaction?

Good expense management can be critical to employee satisfaction as it ensures they get their money back quickly and the experience of submitting expense claims is an easy one.

However, for many companies, the cost-of-living crisis is showing their expense processes to be inadequate for these challenges. Perhaps one of the most prominent of those challenges has resulted from working from home policies – a relatively new consideration since the pandemic.

With working from home much more commonplace, 45% of employees say their employer is encouraging them to work from home to save on office electricity and heating bills. However, many employees are being ushered back into the office by financial difficulties, with 47% of workers going in to avoid consuming energy at home.

So, should businesses pay for the household bills when employees work from home?

The answer is yes! The likelihood is business expense processes will have to account for at least a portion of employees’ energy bills if they’re to continue encouraging remote

working. Finance teams will also have to remain vigilant for an assumed increase in employee expenses that may lie outside company policy.

Ultimately, finance teams have a balancing act on their hands – creating efficient business expense policies that look after tightening budgets, while keeping employees satisfied.

The benefits of business process automation for successful expense management

A lot of the current business expense processes are long-winded, manual, and stressful. It’s these poor user experiences that have prompted a big appetite for automation. Currently, half of employees believe expense management automation would simplify their efforts in claiming expenses. And 51% of finance and HR decision-makers similarly agree that they’re relying far too much on manual processes which aren’t suited to hybrid working.

With an automated expense process, employees are easily able to upload photos of receipts to a centralised system, without the need for form-filling. From there, automation can filter claims against company policies before being checked over by staff.

Beyond making for an easy, intuitive, and fast service, automation has the capability to tackle some of the biggest challenges surrounding current business expense management.

Firstly, new policies can be rolled out quickly across the system which cuts down on training time for employees who would have done this manually. This is particularly helpful as businesses begin to adapt their expense policies to those suited for the modern-day remote workplace.

Secondly, business process automation leaves little room for error in terms of checking expenses against policies. It also means that expenses can be compliance checked at a much faster rate, saving the finance department valuable time to dedicate elsewhere, and ensuring employees are reimbursed quickly.

How can you justify investments in expense management automation?

Despite the evident benefits of automation for successful expense management, it’s not always easy to justify its investment – especially during financially testing times.

Two of the most common barriers to implementing automation within finance teams is a lack of buy-in from key stakeholders and a lack of perceived value for money.

Understandably, key stakeholders are hesitant to spend money when their focus is tightening the purse strings. In addition, if employees don’t realise the full benefits of expense management automation they’re unlikely to invest time in learning how to use it or understand the advantages it could bring.

In turn, the first action to take when considering implementing automation is not the investment itself, but an education piece. It’s all about ensuring everyone in the business understands that great employee expense management bolstered by automation can

enable compliance, employee satisfaction, and efficient, cost-effective expense processing

If leaders can communicate these advantages, they will be in a much stronger position to gain support in using automation. This will shape the expense management needed to operate successfully in today’s volatile environment, bringing further long-term benefits with it.

Download the report “Expense Management in times of inflation: How to improve employee experience” if you want to learn more about the research and how to manage employee experience in these economically challenging times.