Prepaid cards have a new role to play when it comes to helping the finance and administration manage the expenses in a company. A small to medium sized business set-up would have a minimum of 50 – 200 employees having travel and other monthly expenses. This expense accounts for the 2nd major expense in an organization after salaries. The expense management involving disbursement and tallying has always been a messy job for the finance team. Still organizations use paper and excel to manage the expenses.
Although organizations are used to following the traditional system of expense management, it wastes a lots of time, effort and money. Organizations have started moving towards third party systems for such tedious and time consuming work. But, such burdensome work are still prone to a lot of errors and duplications in spite of using digital tools. These third party systems are vulnerable to fraud and un-ethical activities within the organization like – Approvals from managers without cross verifying the actual details; auditing errors; human errors; not in sync with the organizational hierarchy and approval processes; inconsistent work-flows.
Providing a pre-paid expense card to all the employees and encouraging them to use the card for the official expenses would help in smoothening the process. The Expense card should have multiple pockets to accommodate various expenses of the month. A provision for the employees to map the expenses with supporting documents within the system to record the data on real time basis. An on the go expense management system would help the employees keep a track of their expense and would be convenient for the finance team to map the expenses department wise.
A Pre-paid expense card along with an automated Expense Management System would integrate with the business environment and would include reimbursements, travel requests, auto-approval limits, approval hierarchy, time stamps on the expense made etc. An automated system like this would simplify the lives of the employer as well as the employees. Introduction of pre-paid expense cards would definitely be an blessing to all types of organizations. It would be very easy to track and manage all the business related expenses and the finance department would be able to focus on much productive work rather than solving the expense management issues of the employees.
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