Who likes paperwork and spending too much time filling papers? Expense reports represented a real headache for the business traveler, the manager, the accounting department, and nearly every sector in the company. Business travelers have multiple expenses during their travel, such as hotel expenses, transport, events, etc. Besides, in the past, companies had to store every single travel invoice spent by their business travelers for legal purposes.
Luckily, technology has nocked their doors and introduced solutions to get rid of the unnecessary fees and all the printing and paperwork.
Why is digitizing expense reports important?
To digitize report expenses, companies need to adopt a specific technology called OCR. In simple words, “OCR, or optical character recognition, is the technology that allows you to convert different types of documents, including bills and invoices, pdf files or images captured digitally into editable and searchable data.”
No more than a mobile phone and all the unnecessary paperwork is done. Now, to understand the importance of digitalization, let’s have a look at some of the drawbacks of managing physical invoices:
In research done by the global business travel association (GBTA) to identify the real cost of expense reporting. They found out that it is:
Time-consuming
20 minutes is the average time to treat one expense report. Besides, to correct an error in expense reports, companies need an extra 18 minutes. Imagine the time they spent on treating many reports for different business travelers every day.
More costs
The research also proved that one expense report costs the company 53 euros per invoice. Added to this, for fixing an error it needs an extra 52 euros.
Hight possibility of error
Expense reports were made manually through Microsoft Excel. Consequently, human error is likely to occur. According to the research, 19% is the average expense reports with errors.
More and more paper consumption
We can not deny the impact of paper consumption on the environment. Did you know that the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year? And that 45% of paper printed in offices ends up trashed by the end of the day. Moreover, the average business’ paper consumption grows by 22% per year, meaning in 3.3 years your paper consumption will double.
Using OCR technology inside travel management apps is a real revolution when it comes to travel expense reports and it has many advantages mentioned above.
