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What great things could your employees be doing instead of expenses?

As businesses, we go to great lengths to find the best employees - to build teams full of smart, productive, and creative workers.

So it would seem crazy if we then asked these people to spend a significant chunk of their working lives…doing their expenses.

And yet this is exactly what continues to happen.

In offices and workplaces throughout the globe, there are millions of employees who still have to manually manage this tedious task.

A recent global study, commissioned by Webexpenses, found that 66% of businesses handle their employee expenses using a traditional approach - paper receipts, forms, and Excel spreadsheets.

How much time is wasted on expenses?

The average amount of time it takes for an employee to submit an expense report is 41 minutes. Multiply this by the frequency of claims and the number of workers and the figures quickly start to become scary.

On top of this, is all the time it takes for finance teams to manually input, check, and process each and every claim that’s received.

It all adds up to one colossal waste of time.

Just think of what could have been lost if some of our greatest thinkers had to devote so much time to mindless expense chores?

And what impact could it be having on today’s world?

What kind of innovations and breakthroughs has we been denied as a result of talented employees being focused on a pile of paper receipts? Could it explain why flying cars, hologram chess, and holidays to Mars aren’t yet a thing?

Probably not.

But there are real business consequences as a result of productivity lost to these outdated paper-based tasks. It’s something that no business in 2019 needs to waste time or resources on.

Stop wasting time

Cloud-based expense management, automated processes, and smartphone apps have removed the need for manual handling of expenses.

The recent addition of the most advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scanning to Webexpenses means that a paper receipt can be converted into a digital claim in less than 30 seconds.

It allows the whole process to be streamlined with real-time data and automated processes, minimizing the need for manual handling of expense information for claimants and account managers.

It’s a simple change to make - one that lets employees do their jobs - not their expenses.