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Leverage mobile tools and applications that make it easier and faster for cardholders to complete reports on the go. Most expense reporting tools have mobile capabilities or are now mobile-accessible. For example, there are tools that allow cardholders to access a mobile website and snap and store pictures of their travel expense receipts. The digital receipt images can then be more quickly and easily used to populate the expense report. Cardholders can throw away the paper receipts and don’t have to worry about losing or misplacing them. Plus, having the images stored digitally saves time spent faxing or stapling copies to paper expense reports. More than a quarter (26%) of respondents
to the Corporate Travel Card Benchmark Survey said they review and approve expense reports with mobile technology. Among Fortune 500 respondents, that number rises to 44%. The survey suggests that the use of mobile technology reduces the average expense report processing time by two minutes (from 40 minutes down to 38).
Do not require receipts for expenses under a designated threshold. This reduces the amount of time it takes cardholders to expense lower-dollar transactions. That’s significant when you consider that, quite often, the time spent expensing a small transaction will cost the company the same amount as the transaction itself in lost employee productivity.
Have both mandatory initial and ongoing training requirements for cardholders. According to the RPMG survey, the number of companies having mandatory initial training requirements grew from 36% to 54% from 2006 to 2012, and those with mandatory ongoing training rose from 11% to 24%. Such training can both sensitise employees to the importance of completing expense reports in a timely fashion and provide them with the knowledge and tools they need to complete the task as efficiently as possible.
TACTICS AROUND DISCIPLINARY ACTIONS
Publish a clear description of disciplinary actions – and follow through. Before taking disciplinary actions, be sure you have a way to track and execute on them. Then publish the actions so employees are aware of them, and consider implementing these strategies to get employees’ attention:
● Practise individual billing and make employees responsible for delinquency fees. Individual billing helps the cardholder understand any late fees and finance charges driven by their delinquency. A company may require the cardholder to pay those out of pocket as well.
● Subtract delinquent amounts from cardholder paychecks. For a company that has not had good results with existing policies, this action may produce
better compliance. While this could be a very effective method, be aware that various federal and state laws may apply. For example, it is prohibited to reduce an employee’s pay below the statutory minimum for certain types of wage deductions.
● Have Internal Audit participate in auditing expense reports. Sometimes a card programme administrator’s pleadings can fall on deaf ears. That’s why it’s helpful when some companies invite their Internal Audit partners to review their processes and delinquencies once a year. When Internal Audit is involved, employees may listen a bit more carefully and adhere to policy.
SUMMARY A combination of making it faster and easier for employees to fill out and submit expense reports and giving them greater incentives to do so can help make the timely performance of this duty a higher priority for them. Again, not all of these suggested practices will be appropriate for every company. To determine which ones will make sense at your company, contact your Card Account Manager to discuss your situation in greater detail.
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