Staff expense claims can be a burden for many businesses – time-consuming and tedious to manage, without providing the business with enough transparency. Employees get frustrated, accounts staff are tired of chasing claims, and firms become more susceptible to exaggerated or fraudulent claims.
We knew there was a smarter way to tackle the expense claim headache. So, we created a fully mobile and paperless expense automation module called Expense. It’s guaranteed to save you quantifiable time.
Customers who use Expense not only enjoy the vast amount of labour time it saves, but they also love how easy it is to use.
"It's really reduced the amount of manual entry we've had to do. It’s improved accuracy as well. We literally used to be chasing around pieces of paper - Expense has eliminated that." - Steph Powell, Management Accountant at Apollo Projects.
When we built Expense, we focused our attention on two main pain points: workflows around cash reimbursements and company-paid credit cards. Expense was designed to eliminate any unnecessary data entry and provide a platform that people loved to use.
When we examined these workflows, we quickly realised the bottleneck was often on the card holders or staff i.e. compiling and filing their expenses was painful, time-consuming and tedious. We knew a simpler, smartphone-based solution that these users enjoyed using would make them more likely to complete their claims at the end of the month, saving the accounts team endlessly chasing them up.
We researched other solutions in the market and quickly identified that they often focused on streamlining the accounts teams’ job. Although this looked like a quick win. The reality was that a typical construction business had an accounts team of 3-5 staff, but a list of 20+ users that submitted expense claims. So, although there is a large saving for an accounts team by eliminating double entry, the more significant, unseen gain was in the multiplier of slashing 30 minutes of admin time across a team of 20+.
The Expense mobile solution Lentune created allows users to simply photograph their receipts as they go. These are saved directly into the system, eliminating the need to keep paper receipts.
We then looked at how we could speed up the process of adding the expense description and automatically coding it to a cost centre, and developed two innovations. First, enabling users to literally ‘talk’ to the Expense app, describing the expense category. Second, the app itself learns over time what sort of expenses are allocated to what cost centre, and codes them automatically.