The following steps are involved in the expense management process:

• Employees’ reporting of business expenses
• Managers/approvers must verify and validate reports.
• Accountants/finance teams audit expense reports for compliance.
• Payments for employee expenditure reimbursements are processed.
• External audits need the safekeeping of expenses, receipts, and documents.

It appears to be straightforward, but there are obstacles at every step of the process that, if not addressed properly, might jeopardize the business’s stability and growth. To create an effective spending management system, it is therefore critical to comprehend these problems.

The expenditure management process is filled with obstacles from the time you set up policies until reimbursements are finalized, in addition to being time-consuming and labor-intensive. Then there were several more. The three most typical issues in spending control are listed below.

1. There are no defined policies on travel and expenses.

Employees start the cost reporting cycle, and with unclear expenditure policies, the first step is when the difficulty starts. Especially since expenditure reporting is always a last-minute task that everyone dreads.

Employees confront the following issues as a result of imprecise travel and expenditure policies:

• It’s difficult to remember cost policies and classifications as time goes by.
• As a result, employees file claims for expenses that are not covered by the policy.
• Employees are provided reports to resubmit, causing payouts to be delayed.
• Expense report fraud occurs when non-compliant expenses are compensated.
• Employees may try to repeat unchecked offenses because they aren’t completely aware of the consequences of expense report fraud.

2. Inefficient workflows for expenditure approval

If the approval workflow is not clearly defined, the expenditure report may not reach the correct person in the right time frame, just as it may not reach the right person in the right time frame if the travel and expense policies are not well defined. This leads to irritation, misunderstanding, and delays in reimbursing employees for money they spent out of their own pockets to help your company.

Employees and finance teams encounter the following issues as a result of poor approval workflows:

• The entire reimbursement process is unknown to employees and approvers.
• They waste time trying to figure out who gets which reports.
• There’s a good probability an approver may overlook an expenditure report email.
• It’s possible that fraudulent or out-of-policy claims will go unnoticed.
  Reimbursements are delayed as a result of the continual and lengthy back and forth.
• There is no single location where all expenditure report activity is tracked.
• Finance departments find it challenging to maintain track of bottlenecks and compliance.
• Without a clear audit trail, the company will inevitably be audited.

3. Delayed refunds for employee expenses

Expense reimbursements are a time-consuming and exhausting process. Nobody enjoys expense reporting, whether it’s because of the numerous back-and-forths between employees and finance teams or because of the massive amount of human data entry, verification, and processing.

In addition, delayed payments of employee expenses result in:

• Employee unhappiness and morale are at an all-time low.
• Employees lose the money they invested in the business.
• There isn’t enough time to devote to the things that are truly important.
• Out-of-policy claims may be allowed due to last-minute approvals.
• Finance departments are unable to close books on schedule.

Traditional expense management is characterized by delays, errors, scams, and harsh audits. As a result, both small and large firms are turning to more efficient ways of managing spending.

Receipts and records on paper are used in traditional cost management systems. To give you an idea of what a standard cost management system looks like, consider the following:

• Employees are responsible for keeping all business receipts safe in order to collect reimbursements at the start of each reimbursement cycle.
• Approvers must manually check expenditure claims for accuracy and compliance with the company’s travel and spending policy.
• Before processing, finance teams must audit all approved spending receipts with paper trails.
• Finance teams must then organize and maintain all receipts and documents for future internal and external audits.