Once you file a few expense reports at work, a couple of things become clear.
First, expense management software is designed for and sold to finance departments to keep employee spending in line. Often, it feels as if no one did any user testing with everyday workers.
Second, many of the people who approve your expense reports think that if the process is noxious enough, then you won’t submit as many expenses.
This is not too cynical of a read. Geoff Charles, the vice president of product at Ramp, which makes reporting software, said in an interview that finance executives had told him that they liked making people jump through hoops.
Even so, we dare to dream of a day when expense reports just happen: You spend money at work, the software starts a report automatically and approval occurs without our ever touching it.
The good news is that the software companies share that dream. If everyone hates their tools a bit less, they win, too.
Expense reports are a necessary evil. Securities laws require a certain amount of financial reporting for public companies, and tracking what a company spends is part of this. Tax laws matter, too, since certain items are deductible at different rates.
And as much as we would like our employers to trust us, people do cheat. Witness the Facebook employees who lost their jobs last month in the wake of what appeared to be misuse of the company’s meal credits, as The Financial Times reported.
The push and pull — and eventual pain — of doing expense reports is around the controls that employers put in place. Consider travel: Bosses can elect to restrict what you buy (only certain hotel chains at a particular price, say), how you buy it (the type of credit card) and how you are reimbursed (that’s where the software comes in).
Start-ups like Navan and Ramp aim to make this all happen seamlessly in one place. They provide travel booking engines and corporate cards loaded with rules that your employer customizes and also supply the software to track and approve it all.
If artificial intelligence is good for anything, it ought to be able to grab a line item from a credit-card bill and drop it into an expense report. The companies that make expense management software are training robots to do that — and to grab receipts from your email inbox or directly from businesses like Uber. And yes, they are well aware of the number of brain cells you kill each year itemizing the taxes from hotel bills.
So why don’t we have no-touch expense reports yet? Some information isn’t on a credit-card bill or a receipt, like who you were with when a dinner tab reached $500 or how it got so high. David Barrett, founder and chief executive of Expensify, said one way to ease some of the pain was to use quick direct messaging for any necessary clarification. Follow-ups by email festooned with warnings and links are inefficient.
If A.I. expense reports feel far removed from your reality, there may be a few reasons. If you’re not already using your employer’s recommended travel booking engine and corporate card, you may be missing out on existing automation that would make your life easier.
It’s also possible that any app you have access to is easier to use than the outdated desktop interface that you’ve been defaulting to for years. Apps can allow you to scan receipts as you go, if you have the discipline to press pause for a minute to do the deed.
If your system is still too hateful, ask your colleagues in corporate finance for something better. Mr. Charles, the Ramp product executive, suggests shooting a video showing the amount of time it takes to file an expense report and sending it up the chain with a simple query: “Surely, this doesn’t make sense?”
And perhaps those colleagues need to ease up on the controls. SAP Concur, the market leader in expense reporting, is the company that many users love to hate on. Chris Juneau, a senior vice president and the head of product marketing there, has heard it all before.
In fact, he all but invites unsolicited feedback with his Concur luggage tag, which frequently draws commentary from people who spot it.
He dutifully takes their comments to product managers, and what he finds is that user pain has more than a little to do with the number of controls and audit triggers that Concur’s customers turn on in the product. In other words, your user experience can depend, in part, on how much risk your colleagues in finance think you represent.
So prove yourself worthy. Don’t cheat with the dinner credits. Then, ask the people in finance for a little more grace. Software may never rid you of expense reports entirely, but a bit more trust all around could make the process easier.
The post In a Perfect World, We’d Eliminate Expense Reports. We’re Getting Closer. appeared first on New York Times.
