Digital progression should be at the forefront of any business’ strategic planning. There is little doubt that the myriad potential digital innovation can offer allows businesses to deliver client solutions that streamline operations, provide valuable insights, and deliver better customer experiences.
However, there is one question that businesses should answer: what should they invest in to achieve their commercial objectives? Let’s also look at why receipt digitization should be a part of every business now.
For any business looking to hone or replace traditional expense reporting methods with a better solution to help them to evaluate if they are utilising their company’s finances in the best way there is only one option: scanned receipts OCR and information extraction. This is especially true of businesses with a growing number of employees who have business expenses that need to be reimbursed.
Interested in learning why mobile expense reporting is the new standard? Read below for the definitive, convincing argument.
Traditional Ways of Expense Reporting Are Inefficient
No matter what your business does or what sector you operate in, there’s no denying that traditional ways of expense reporting are – and have always been – inefficient.
The entire process takes time. It’s also expense – especially if business owners have to pay people a salary just for calculating expenses. Now, there may be other duties that finance professionals perform as part of their role, but we’d argue that if even 20% of an employee’s time is spent calculating expenses and reimbursements, that’s too much.
Let’s say you have a single finance employee working a 40-hour week and they spent 20% of their time on expenses. That’s 8 hours a week. If they spend 10% of their time on expenses that’s 4 hours a week.
Can you really day that the best use of your finance professionals or team is to spend an entire morning (at the very least) calculating expenses? Extract data from scanned receipts using an app with OCR software and you’ll instantly improve the efficiency of your team.
What if you have 5 finance employees? If each performs expense reporting duties, they could spend 40 hours a week or 20 hours minimum calculating expenses!
The Consequences of Traditional Expense Reporting
As shocking as this seems, there are farther reaching implications to having employees calculating expenses. These consequences of traditional expense reporting can be significant – for businesses large and small.
Employees may become demotivated over time, not calculating expenses as meticulously as the role needs. Worse still, it may discourage employees from wanting to travel for their role. This can affect your sales.
Then there’s the problem that some finance teams may feel that managing expenses isn’t a pertinent aspect to their role. They may even slack off. This can cause a whole host of problems, from disgruntled employees to false claiming of expenses which is not good for your bottom line.
Communication between the accounts team and your employees can also become a problem. Think about it, the multiple back and forth between colleagues as they try to gather expense reports is, in essence, wasted time.
Let’s not forget that traditional expense reporting is a process rife with bottlenecks. Delayed reimbursements are not uncommon, nor are disgruntled employees. However, with mobile receipt extraction using an app with cutting-edge, accurate zonal OCR, like Tabscanner, and such delays will be reduced.
Why? All employees have to do is to take a picture of a receipt and upload it into a shared cloud drive and bingo! Finance employees have immediate access to expenses.
Why Mobile Receipt Digitizaton Is the New Standard
To stay ahead of the game, businesses need to adopt digital technology to streamline operations, improve performance, gain valuable commercial insight – and improve the job satisfaction for their employees.
Now, there any many reasons why businesses need to adopt OCR technology to extract data from scanned receipts (some of which we’ve already made clear) but to summarise, let’s take a look at the core reasons why your business should adopt mobile receipt data extraction software NOW.
- It automates a substantial part of the manual work traditionally associated with expense management, saving you valuable time and money.
- The ability to report expenses directly from your mobile phone makes the whole process straightforward and timely – better still, employees can log their expenses anywhere in the world.
- You make life so much easier for accounting professionals – allowing them to concentrate on more important aspects of their role.
Businesses that use an automated expense management solution give their employees the opportunity to report their expenses quickly and when they want – removing any potential bottlenecks when employees rush to send reports at a specific time of the month.
Your business will drastically reduce its paper consumption. This saves an awful lot of space – and is an environmentally friendly and sustainable solution, something that helps potential customers gravitate to your business.
- Using a receipt management app, businesses can store all their receipts in the cloud – no receipts will ever be lost again!
- It’s simple and straightforward to keep a digital audit trail of all business expenses, including any actions taken
- Easy organisation saves much reporting time – allowing businesses to avoid bottlenecks and reimburse colleagues quickly.
The Future of Expense Reporting included Receipt Digitization
With more people than ever before working remotely and many businesses deciding hybrid or remote working with be an operational staple for the foreseeable, it’s clear that large, in-house accounts teams will be a thing of the past.
In truth, there has been a trend towards this way of working for the last few years, but in 2021 this model is likely to be adopted by an increasing number of businesses globally.
The bottom line? Adopt mobile receipt digitization using an app with zonal OCR which delivers the highest levels of accuracy and you will drastically improve overall commercial operations.