How One Company Ensured Policy Compliance and Reduced Excessive Spending

Published July 22, 2015
reduce expense spending

Policy compliance is one of the biggest frustrations when dealing with expense management. How do you get employees to hand in their expense reports on time and with the proper documentation to ensure everything's in line with company spending policies?

The quick answer? Switch to online expense management software.

Take the Learning Care Group, for example. This childhood education company has more than 1^200 employees submitting expenses ranging from incidental daycare center expenses to travel.

Prior to implementing ExpenseWire, the accounting team relied on their employees to correctly submit expenses in a timely manner. The process consisted of manually checking-in expenses on spreadsheets, sending reminders for information, and waiting for information.

The accounting team experienced long lag times in receiving the reports via U.S. postal mail and interoffice mail. And since the entire workflow was done manually, it took the department an even longer time to verify compliance.

After implementing ExpenseWire, all of the manual processes were rendered obsolete. ExpenseWire's reporting provided a quick, high-level view of outstanding tasks and what to expect next. In addition, the pre-defined rules limited excessive spending and enforced document collection.

The Learning Care Group's director of accounting put the benefits of their new online expense reporting software in perspective. "In hard costs, we had $20^000 in savings switching from manual checks to ACH [electronic payments]."