If employees in your company regularly travel for business purposes or entertain clients, expense report software is a wise investment. The advantage of expense report management software is that it gives you an easy-to-use means of tracking spending and enforcing company policies, ensuring that ineligible items aren’t being claimed and that employees are staying within their budgetary limits.
Expense Report Software Features
Both Web-based and desktop expense reports software typically include the following features:
- Automatic notification and routing of expense requests. Also, you will have the ability to create a customized tracking process to improve overall departmental efficiency.
- Customizable expense policies. You will be able to tell a particular user to supply missing information or reject a report automatically if certain criteria are not met.
- One-click attaching of receipt scans and expense report scans.
- Automatic importation of company credit card information.
- Automatic employee reimbursement. This feature can usually be enabled if your company reimburses employees via direct deposit to a checking or savings account. Some payroll software programs also offer automatic expense reimbursement options.
- Self-service travel booking capabilities. While this feature is standard on many travel expense report software products, many generalized applications also offer it.
- Customizable expense categories. While all quality expense report software comes with a complete, pre-populated list of expense categories, you can expand the offerings to include those which may be unique to your business.
- Scalability. If your company is growing, you’ll have the ability to add however many users to the database as you need to.
Popular Expense Report Management Software
Free expense report software is widely available online, but you won’t generally have very many custom options that you can use to make the system easier for your employees to use. If you truly want to take full advantage of the wide-ranging capabilities of expense report software, you should shop for a paid product that’s specifically designed to meet the needs of your organization.
Both Microsoft Dynamics and Intuit’s QuickBooks offer expense tracking capabilities, but you can also use Web-based or desktop applications that are specially created for expense reporting. GlobalPoint Technologies offers ExpensePoint WEB software, and other popular applications include NetSuite, Expense Anywhere, Expensewatch and SuperPro Expense Report.