Running a small business can be one giant juggling act, especially when it comes to expense reimbursements. When your employees or partners pay for supplies out of pocket, or incur expenses while traveling on business, you need an accurate, efficient way to reimburse them as quickly as possible.
It’s difficult enough to keep track of what you’re spending, let alone what your employees are spending! When multiple people start spending company money, organization is absolutely essential for making sure everyone gets paid back swiftly and all funds are accurately tracked for tax purposes.
Expense reimbursements may be required when employees run errands, shop for supplies, travel to meetings outside of the office, attend conferences, take clients to lunch, take the company car to be serviced, stay overnight at a hotel, book airfare, take a cab, rent a car, and more.
Luckily, many of the expenses you’ll be required to reimburse double as tax write-offs for you as the small business owner. Because of this, keeping track of your small business expense reimbursements is crucial to saving money come tax season.
Gone are the days of paper expense reporting, where employees had to manually fill out spreadsheets, submit stacks of stapled receipts, and wait weeks to be paid back. With receipt scanning services like those available from Shoeboxed, your employees can now instantly upload their receipts to a single, cloud-based account. Within that account, they can edit individual expenses, categorize their spending with customized labels, and create one-click expense reports.
Shoeboxed is especially useful during travel. If your employees are out of town for a conference, they can simply snap a picture of each receipt they receive with their smartphone. The Shoeboxed app instantly digitizes the data from each receipt and uploads it to your company account. You can track spending in real time, and your employees can recycle their receipts instead of bringing piles of paper back to clutter up the office.
When your employees are ready to be reimbursed, they can log in to their Shoeboxed account, select all of the applicable receipts, and generate an instant expense report. From there, they can download the report as a spreadsheet or PDF and email it to you for swift processing.
Once you receive your employee’s expense report, you’ll be able to evaluate individual items and track spending based on date, location, and category. If you have a question or need more information about an individual receipt, simply log in to your Shoeboxed account and search by the receipt’s date, category, or keyword.
Once you’ve approved all of the expenses that need to be reimbursed, it’s easy to pay your employees back. Services like Expense Pay allow you to instantly transfer funds from your business bank account to your employee’s personal account with the click of a button. Instead of waiting for payroll to clear, your employees can rest assured that they’ll be reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses quickly and accurately.
With cloud-based services like those available from Shoeboxed and Expense Pay, staying on top of your small business expense reimbursements is a snap!