In the context of comprehensive digitalization, how can enterprises build an intelligent expense reimbursement system?

As the economy and society fully embark on digital transformation, the iteration speed of new technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence continues to accelerate, and enterprises are gradually 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 popularity, benefiting both large and medium-sized enterprises and smaller enterprises with lower levels of informatization.

I. Background

1. Problems and difficulties facing expense control and reimbursement

Since March 23, 2020, the Notice on Standardizing the Reimbursement, Booking, and Archiving of Electronic Accounting Vouchers stipulates that when reimbursing electronic invoices and other electronic accounting vouchers, finance must retain the original electronic accounting voucher files; however, this is extremely difficult to implement in practice.

As the fully digitalized e-invoice pilot process advances, various regions will receive more and more fully digitalized e-invoices.

Currently, in the practice of expense reimbursement, most electronic invoices received by enterprises need to be identified by accounting personnel through the State Taxation Administration official website. The invoice verification workload is enormous, and problems such as erroneous invoices and duplicate invoices are prone to occur.

Under the traditional reimbursement model, frontline operations are complex and back-end financial verification is difficult. Budgets and expense standards cannot be automatically verified, invoices cannot be automatically compared for duplicates and authenticity, and original e-invoice files cannot be automatically collected. Data is hard to aggregate automatically, frontline operations are difficult, and back-end financial processing is arduous, drawing many complaints.

Although there is a complete reimbursement system, over-standard and over-budget expenditures cannot be responded to in a timely manner, making pre-event and in-process control difficult. In the end, finance only counts and checks budgets, so the budget and expense control cannot truly be implemented.

After receiving payments/reimbursements, finance must manually verify invoice compliance, making the work fragmented, cumbersome, and heavy.

Cashiers have a heavy workload at the payment stage and cannot make payments directly within the system.

Finance needs to manually copy reimbursement vouchers and manually enter bookkeeping vouchers, resulting in an enormous workload.

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

As "Internet+" penetrates into various fields, technologies such as OCR, artificial intelligence, and big data are maturing, smartphones are fully popularized, basic software and hardware infrastructure is complete, and the economy and society can choose more intelligent, efficient, and interconnected methods. Through expense control and reimbursement management business, financial management and business management can be automatically and efficiently connected 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 lay a solid foundation for implementing a comprehensive expense control system, standardizing revenue and expenditure management, strengthening budget constraints, and improving expense control and reimbursement management efficiency.

II. Kailing intelligent expense control reimbursement system solution

Through the following aspects, build a smart expense control and reimbursement system integrating functions such as "budget management, expense reimbursement, connected consumption, ledger and report management, and voucher integration," constructing a complete transparent financial expense control and reimbursement management system before, during, and after the event, and realizing a new agile smart expense control and reimbursement system with fully automated processing of budget-order-reimbursement-payment-voucher.

1. Build a closed loop for budget management

This platform can carry out budget preparation using top-down, bottom-up, and independent preparation methods, and supports multiple management approaches such as rigid, flexible, and elastic.

2. One mobile phone handles the reimbursement process

Provides pre-application and management functions for expenses, supporting approval on mobile terminals such as phones and iPads. Builds full-process management of borrowings and repayments, and provides PC-side services such as reimbursement form filling, approval, offsetting borrowings, and expense standard control, effectively 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.

Use retained electronic data to automatically compare the authenticity of documents (especially electronic documents) and whether they have been reused and reimbursed, solving the cumbersome manual verification of documents by finance.

3. Aggregated multi-platform consumption booking scenarios

For consumption scenarios such as train tickets, hotels, and air tickets generated by official business trips, it is fully integrated with travel applications, so whether the reservation exceeds standards can be determined for the reservation holder at the time of booking, avoiding the inability to process due to exceeding standards during post-trip reimbursement. At the same time, by integrating with travel applications, a complete internal control loop is achieved, 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. Provides various expense control-related reports, such as budget execution statements and expense summary statements, and can manage reports by different dimensions such as various accounts, departments, and projects.

5. Connect online banking payments

Hesi Expense Control is standardized and integrated with the payment and settlement systems of multiple banks. Documents in the expense control system can directly drive bank payments, greatly reducing the finance workload while lowering the error rate.

6. Automatic Voucher Generation from Documents

While realizing the electronic reimbursement process, the electronic documents generated can automatically generate pre-made vouchers and synchronize them to various ERP financial systems in real time, generating formal financial vouchers with one click, greatly reducing the financial workload.

7. Storage of original files of electronic bills

Meet the requirements of the "Notice on Regulating the Reimbursement, Booking and Archiving of Electronic Accounting Vouchers" for the electronic archiving of electronic accounting vouchers, making financial work more compliant. At the same time, it provides finance with the ability to access and retrieve electronic accounting voucher files at any time and to quickly obtain the corresponding reimbursement documents and approval processes.

III. Building an expense control reimbursement system has significant value and significance

1.Manage invisibly, serve warmly

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 daily travel expense reimbursement as an example, its control points include three stages: first, official business trip approval; second, budget control; third, expense reimbursement approval. Relevant personnel only need to log into the platform via mobile phone, click "Travel Reimbursement," and from submitting the official business trip application, they can link to the business travel platform with one click, automatically purchase train tickets (plane tickets) and book hotels according to position-level matching standards, enjoy travel subsidies, and complete online leadership approval, thereby completing the entire travel expense reimbursement process, truly achieving "management in the invisible, service in warmth."

2.Reduce fees and increase efficiency, 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. With deep functional integration, it achieves a high degree of integration with financial control, realizing comprehensive automated processing from budget to ordering, reimbursement, payment, and vouchers, greatly improving financial office efficiency and achieving full-process expense control and intelligent analysis. It uses budgets and real-time control to advance expense control work.

[Efficiency improvement] Intelligent filling can save 75% of reimbursement time, improve work efficiency, and reduce repetitive low-frequency work. Mobile approval can approve documents in real time, improve approval efficiency, and reduce the communication cost of manual follow-up.

[Cost Reduction] Based on practice, it can reduce expense costs, provide real-time understanding of each expense, effectively eliminate unplanned expenditures, and greatly save daily and travel expense costs.

[Management] can 100% improve reimbursement compliance, greatly reduce manual communication costs, provide a complete reimbursement management and expense control system, and enhance policy execution.

[Transparency] Transparent expense standards are automatically enforced and implemented; transparent data reports provide decision-makers with forward-looking data, enabling decisions and driving improvement through key indicators.

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.