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Employee Experience | HR Integrations | Integrations

Five Benefits of an Integrated Employee Expense Management System

Best practices NetSuite integrations white paper

By Sharvaani, Content Marketing Manager


Employee expense management is a critical part of effectively managing employees, from the moment they join an organization, until the moment they leave. Employees depend on a well-functioning expense management program so that they can be properly reimbursed in a timely and efficient manner. Despite its importance, however, it is a function not usually discussed at great length unless it is broken.

Savvy corporations are well aware of the need to reimburse employees effectively, and typically invest in expense management platforms to register, process, pay and control expenses initiated by employees.

Despite these investments, the process of managing expenses is still often complicated and cumbersome. Expense management processes include capturing, approving, compiling, and reimbursing the employees, oftentimes managed in multiple different systems. Any delay in this process leaves the employee frustrated, which immediately hurts morale and productivity. Three most common errors in expense management processing include:

  • Inaccurate Reimbursements: According to the 2019 Travel and Expense Management Trends Report, 43% of organizations still manage expense reporting manually, which allows a lot of room for error. Manual processes lead to inaccurate reimbursements, which severely affects morale and causes productivity delays.
  • Corporate Policy Compliance Violations: When there is confusion regarding corporate travel policy, expenses are often submitted erroneously and either rejected at the time of review, or inaccurately reimbursed. The result is, at best, reimbursement delays or, at worst, lost corporate revenue. A specific corporate travel policy can go a long way toward decreasing reimbursement delays, but needs to be properly integrated with existing expense management practices.
  • Delayed Reimbursements: There are many reasons why an expense report can be delayed. For example, If an expense report is improperly filled out by an employee, or if the team managing expense reports is not available, the process of fulfilling a reimbursement request may be severely impeded. To avoid these delays, Finance and HR managers should automate and integrate as much of the process as possible.

Benefits of an Efficient Employee Expense Management System

An efficient and itemized expense management system is designed to effectively manage and execute the reimbursement needs of employees in a speedy and effective manner to protect productivity and morale, subject to corporate policies and procedures. It houses critical data used to process and analyze the reimbursement request. It also must properly coordinate with data received from other related systems, such as employee data repositories and accounting software. If these goals are met, five key benefits are realized:

  1. Faster employee onboarding: One of the biggest time investments that HR managers must make is with new employees. As part of that time investment, HR must work with finance to provide these employees with access to expense reporting. Automating the expense management process, and integrating data from key systems together (such as HCM systems with expense management platforms) decreases required setup times. As a result, employee onboarding is faster and HR and finance teams are more productive and efficient.
  2. Increased trust between employer and employee: If expenses are submitted properly and processed in a reasonable timeframe, the bond between employers and employees is strengthened. Employees feel good about their employers and have the faith in them to process their expenses without being distracted from other responsibilities. At the same time, employers have faith in their employees to self-service their needs as much as is appropriate for the expense management process.
  3. Increased HR and finance manager productivity: With automated expense reporting processes in place, employees not only are able to submit expense reports on their own, but are also able to solve issues and exceptions that may arise from those reports independently as well. This ability does huge favors for HR and finance teams who would otherwise be required to step in and help. As a result, both of these teams are more productive attending to other critical tasks.
  4. Increased employee satisfaction and morale: When expense reporting and review processes are automated and integrated with critical related systems, it leads to accelerated reimbursement timelines. As a result, employees are satisfied and productive, and are able to put their mind to critical work projects. Expense reporting might not be a process that is discussed frequently, but that can change very fast once it begins to slow down or break. The fewer times that subject has to be addressed, the more time employees have to get their work done.
  5. Enhanced personal financial planning: Timing and the ability to make predictions is a critical part of managing finances. At a personal level, most of us know when to expect our paychecks, which helps us make good decisions about paying bills. Similarly, by automating the expense management process, we can make more accurate predictions about when we will receive the reimbursement. That accuracy helps us establish better financial planning.

Effective expense report process management is a cakewalk with Jitterbit’s Employee Experience API360 Solutions. These solutions help organizations integrate their existing expense management-related integration APIs with systems such as Concur, Coupa, Paycom and others to make these processes easier for both employees and employers. This helps optimize expense account registration and report processing while increasing employee morale so businesses can focus on other critical requirements. Process Templates are pre-built mappings and workflows for a specific integration need between endpoints. Templates provide a head start to the integration project so that you don’t have to build everything from scratch. They provide the most common field mappings and use cases that most customers need. Examples of these templates include:

  • Workday <> Coupa Employee Expense Template: Jitterbit has ready-to-use Workday Coupa integration templates that enable employees to avoid performing cumbersome expense recording procedures. A pre-packaged solution, this template speeds up expense management account set up and reduces technical support requirements. HR personnel save on the time to perform expense recording manually, leading to higher productivity. Employees feel a higher sense of satisfaction and morale thanks to accelerated time to pay.
  • NetSuite <> Coupa Employee Expense Template: Designed for existing Workday and Coupa users, this template is designed to ease time management burdens for both employees and the HR managers who service them. Expense reporting account creation and management is streamlined and automated, reducing the room for human error, increasing the employee expense reimbursement speed and providing a better overall experience for all users.

Getting Started with Employee 360 HR Data Management

Jitterbit is passionate about streamlining the employee expense management process. We believe that the more effective this process is, the happier and more effective employees will be.

Don’t take our word for it. Read how companies like SmartRecruiters and KeyedIn Solutions have enabled Employee 360 integrations to take their HR capabilities to the next level.

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