Why should enterprises build an expense reimbursement system?

As the economy and society fully embark on the digital transformation process, the iteration speed of new technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence is accelerating, and enterprises are gradually embarking on the path of exploring digital models suited to their own development. In recent years, the financial digitalization path using expense reimbursement systems as an entry point has gradually gained momentum, benefiting both large and medium-sized enterprises and smaller enterprises with lower levels of informatization.

I. Background

1. Problems and Dilemmas Facing Expense Control and Reimbursement

From March 23, 2020, the "Notice on Regulating the Reimbursement, Booking, and Archiving of Electronic Accounting Vouchers" requires that when reimbursing electronic invoices and other electronic accounting vouchers, finance must also retain the original electronic accounting voucher files, which is extremely difficult in practice.。

·As the pilot process for fully digitalized e-invoices advances, more and more fully digitalized e-invoices will be received in various regions;

·Currently, for e-invoices received in expense reimbursement practice, most enterprises need accounting staff to identify them via the State Taxation Administration official website. Invoice verification is heavy, and issues such as erroneous or duplicate invoices easily occur;

·Under the traditional reimbursement model, personnel operations are complicated, back-end financial verification is difficult, budgets and expense standards cannot be automatically verified, invoices cannot be automatically compared for duplication or authenticity, original files of electronic invoices cannot be automatically collected, data cannot be automatically aggregated, front-line operations are difficult, back-end financial processing is troublesome, and complaints are numerous;

·Although complete reimbursement systems exist, overspending and over-budget expenditures are difficult to respond to in a timely manner, and pre-event and in-event control cannot be achieved. Ultimately, only finance is left to tally and check budgets, and the budget and expense control efforts are difficult to truly implement;

·After receiving payment/reimbursement, finance must manually verify the compliance of documents, which is fragmented and cumbersome with an enormous workload;

·At the payment stage, the cashier has a large payment workload and cannot make payments directly within the system;

·Finance manually transcribes reimbursement vouchers, and manual entry of accounting vouchers involves an enormous workload.

2. The development of information technology has effectively solved the above difficulties

As "Internet+" penetrates into every aspect, technologies and methods such as OCR, artificial intelligence, and big data are maturing, basic software and hardware infrastructure such as smartphones is fully popularized, and the economy and society can already choose more intelligent, efficient, and interconnected methods, automatically and efficiently connecting financial management with business management through expense control and reimbursement management business to build an intelligent expense control and reimbursement solution.

Therefore, fully leveraging emerging internet technologies and building a new agile and efficient intelligent expense control and reimbursement system will provide strong support for fully implementing expense control systems, standardizing revenue and expenditure management, strengthening budget constraints, and improving expense control and reimbursement management efficiency.

II. Recommended Target Solution for the Expense Control and Reimbursement System

Build a smart expense control and reimbursement system covering functions such as budget management, expense reimbursement, connected consumption, ledger and report management, and voucher integration, creating a new agile smart expense control and reimbursement system with fully automated processing from budget to ordering to reimbursement to payment to vouchers, and establishing a complete transparent financial expense control and reimbursement management system before, during, and after the event.

1. Build a closed loop for budget management

The platform can prepare budgets using top-down, bottom-up, and independent preparation methods, supporting rigid, flexible, and elastic management approaches.

2. One mobile phone handles the reimbursement process

Provides pre-application and management of expenses, supporting approval on mobile terminals such as phones and iPads; builds full-process management of borrowings and repayments; provides PC-side reimbursement form filling, approval, offsetting borrowings, expense standard control, etc., solving problems such as out-of-pocket advances for business trips and difficult reimbursement.

With mobile phone cameras and the latest OCR intelligent recognition technology, maximize automatic filling and eliminate the cumbersome manual filling process.

Leverage retained electronic data to automatically verify the authenticity of invoices (especially electronic invoices) and whether they have been reused or reimbursed, eliminating the tedious manual verification of invoices by finance staff.

3. Aggregated multi-platform consumption booking scenarios

For consumption scenarios such as train tickets, hotels, and air tickets generated by official business trips, it achieves full integration with travel applications, and determines at the time of booking whether the reservation holder exceeds standards, avoiding the inability to process due to exceeding standards during post-trip reimbursement. At the same time, by integrating with travel applications, it achieves a complete internal control loop, which can greatly shorten the subsequent reimbursement process and reduce travel reimbursement work.

4. Ledgers and reports ensure more reasonable expense support

Supports management of invoice ledgers, loan ledgers, etc.; various expense control-related reports such as budget execution statements and expense summary statements can all be managed by different dimensions such as various accounts, departments, and projects.

Customers, after-sales work orders, etc. are interconnected with outing applications and expense reimbursement data, enabling cost accounting for individual customers/projects, and business data can help leaders better approve documents in the system.

5. Connect online banking payments

Standardized integration with the payment and settlement systems of multiple banks; documents in the expense control system directly drive bank payments, greatly reducing the finance workload while lowering the error rate.

6. Automatic Voucher Generation from Documents

While achieving the electronic reimbursement process, the electronic documents generated are automatically converted into pre-generated vouchers that can be instantly synced to various ERP financial systems, generating official financial vouchers with one click, greatly reducing financial workload.

7. Storage of original electronic document files

Achieve compliance with the requirements of the Notice on Regulating the Reimbursement, Booking, and Archiving of Electronic Accounting Vouchers for electronic archiving of electronic accounting vouchers, making financial work more compliant; at the same time provide the ability for finance to access and obtain electronic accounting voucher files at any time, as well as quickly obtain corresponding reimbursement documents and approval processes.

III. The value and significance of building an expense control reimbursement system

1. Management in the invisible, service in the warm

Take providing quality services as a strong booster for internal control implementation, fully leverage the "Internet+" management model, and achieve control over economic activities through "keyboard services" or "fingertip services."

Taking routine travel expense reimbursement as an example, there are 3 control points:

·Business trip approval

·Expense budget control

·Expense reimbursement approval

Relevant personnel only need to log in to the platform on their mobile phone, click "Travel Reimbursement," and from submitting a business travel application, one-click link to the business travel platform, automatically matching standards by position level to purchase train (plane) tickets, book hotels, and enjoy travel allowances, as well as online leadership approval, completing the entire travel expense reimbursement process, achieving "management in the invisible, service in warmth."

2. Fee reduction and efficiency improvement, transparent management

Determine reasonable and effective control strategies around expense budgets, standards, and expenditures, while sorting out the control processes for expense expenditures, establishing more pre-control processes based on business and activities, and strengthening the approval control of business leaders and finance leaders over business and activity matters.

Deep functional integration enables a high degree of integration with financial control, fully automating processing from budget to ordering to reimbursement to payment to vouchers, greatly improving financial office efficiency and achieving full-process expense control and intelligent analysis. Budget and real-time control are used to advance expense control work.

[Efficiency improvement]

Intelligent reporting saves 75% of reimbursement time, improves work efficiency, and reduces repetitive low-frequency work.

Mobile approval, real-time approvable documents, improving approval efficiency and reducing the communication cost of manual follow-up.

[Cost Reduction]

According to practice, it will reduce expense costs, provide real-time visibility into each expense, effectively eliminate unplanned expenditures, and greatly save daily and travel expense costs.

[Management]

100% improve reimbursement standardization, greatly reduce manual communication costs, provide a complete reimbursement management and expense control system, and strengthen policy execution.

[Transparency]

Transparent automatic execution and control of expense standards, and transparent data reports provide decision-makers with forward-looking data, using important metrics to make decisions and drive improvement.

Source: internet

With its comprehensive expense management solution, Kailing TechnologyLaunched"Smart Reimbursement"Expense control system, in the new era of fully digitalized e-invoices under China Golden Tax Phase IV, it fully demonstrates its unique advantages, helping enterprises manage various expenses efficiently and conveniently. Through a carefully designed intelligent system architecture and complete functional modules, Kailing Technology not only optimizes the enterprise expense reimbursement process, making it smoother and more precise, but also ensures that enterprises can better adapt to and respond to the requirements of the new tax environment. This not only wins valuable advantages for enterprises in fierce market competition, but also provides solid support for their steady development in a rapidly changing business environment, further advancing the digitalization of enterprise business-finance-tax processes.

Kailing Technology provides enterprise business-finance-tax digital product lines according to enterprise needs:

Solutions for businesses including sales contract management system, procurement contract management system, fully digitalized Leqi interface project, output automatic invoicing system, employee expense control and reimbursement system, input VAT invoice management system, supply chain collaborative reconciliation system, image OCR recognition system, automatic financial bookkeeping system, and electronic accounting archives system, professionally and efficiently supporting the transformation and upgrading of enterprise business-finance-tax digital management.

If you have any business-finance-tax digital transformation needs, welcome to contact us. Beijing Kailing Technology will serve you wholeheartedly.