It’s a plastic world all right. Everybody seems to want to pay everything with a credit card. And while that makes things more convenient for the consumer, it makes life more difficult for the business. Reconciling receipts with credit card payments is one of the most time consuming tasks companies face.
My suggested solution for expense reconciliation? Technology.
I’m suggesting you use technology to do the heavy lifting … the mass reconciliation … and leave only the difficult reconciliations for the staff.
With our clients, it works this way: Let’s say, they receive an expense claim with an attached receipt. The first step is scanning in both the claim and the receipt.
An expense web portal then captures the data from both. It’s then compared and matched with the client’s business rules.
How does this business rules bit work? For example, the client has set the rules so that the maximum allowance for this item is X. The data that’s been scanned in is then compared with the electronic statement from the credit card provider.
Any items that don’t match are sent for manual reconciliation. This includes sending a link to the web portal where staff can match manually, add comments and approve or reject the claim. In other words, only the difficult claims are processed manually.
Sound a bit too “high tech” for your organisation? It isn’t. And it can save your company a fortune by increasing productivity. In future blogs, I’ll write more about it.
In the meantime, I’d suggest looking into automating your credit card reconciliation procedures.
That is, before your competitor automates his.
