If your teams are growing and you're wondering how to effectively track and verify their business expenses, it's high time to think about implementing an effective expense policy within your company. Controlling your employees' financial commitments during their various assignments is vital to your company's financial health. Indeed, the proportion represented by business expenses very often accounts for the lion's share of a company's operating costs.
Fortunately, today there is a wide range of tools that can help you better control and manage your employees' expenses.
What is a corporate spending policy?
This is an internal document that helps avoid any misunderstandings that may arise when the company reimburses business expenses.
It groups together all the rules that must be respected by all employees concerning their financial commitments when traveling.
In particular, you can include :
- the type of expenses authorized ;
- conditions for using a personal vehicle ;
- the rates applied for hotel nights, meals... ;
- supporting documents to be provided ;
- repayment terms...
What tools can help you manage business expenses?
Opening an online pro account gives you the opportunity to benefit from a number of integrated tools, which will lighten the workload of your accounting department and avoid transcription errors, fraud and lost vouchers.
Business expense cards
Business expense cards, whether physical or virtual, give you access to numerous advantages.
- Greater autonomy for your employees
The business expense card makes life easier for your employees when they travel on business. They no longer need to call on a support department within the company to book a train or plane ticket, a hotel night or a car rental. So a last-minute meeting at the other end of France or abroad never puts them in difficulty.
What's more, they don't have to make substantial advances on expenses, which can sometimes put a strain on their personal bank account.
- Perfect financial security for your company
Business expense cards are highly flexible. You can set a different ceiling for each employee holding a card, depending on the tasks he or she is required to perform. You also have the freedom to vary this ceiling, either upwards or downwards, in real time.
You can check the validity of expenses by verifying the receipts associated with them, since after each transaction, your employee must add a photo of the invoice attesting to the reason for payment. In the event of an oversight, a regular reminder is sent until the document is linked to the expense, guaranteeing that you have a receipt for every financial commitment.
If you find that an employee has used his or her card in a way that does not comply with your spending policy, you always have the option of blocking it.
What's more, since payments made by your employees using their business expense card are centralized in a single account, you have an immediate global view, and therefore better control over your cash flow. Finally, business expenses are easier to trace in the event of a tax audit.
Good to know: the best way to maintain total control over your business expenses is to set up a systematic authorization procedure for all your employees before any expenditure is made. In this case, you set their card limit to zero and adjust the amount to the authorized expense.
Receipt management software
Since the entry into force of the rectificative finance law no. 2016-1918 of December 2016, companies have been authorized to keep a copy of their expense reports on a computer medium.
That's why business expense cards are equipped with management software that reads expense receipts and automatically collects them.