How Can You Manage The Busiest Expense Week

'Twas the week before Christmas and all through the workplace, employees were joining the expense paper chase.

But while you're picking out Christmassy knitwear, spare a thought for the finance teams who are yet to clear their biggest hurdle of the year - the busiest expense week.

'Tis the season

It might not seem like much to the rest of us, but the busiest expense week is well on its way to becoming a recognised calendar date.

The busiest expense day in the UK is the second Monday before Christmas, which often sees a 75 per cent rise in the number of expense claims over normal weekday averages.

With the increasing pressure of the cost-of-living, employees will be racing to get all their expenses in and hopefully paid before the end of the year. Currently, 58 per cent of employees are worried about delayed reimbursements impacting their personal finances.

For finance teams this can cause something of a headache, especially those with manual processes. While others get into the party spirit, they’re left to log and validate hundreds of thousands of expenses.

And the UK is not alone, Germany and France both see an increase of over 100 per cent in the number of expense claims submitted in the last week before the holidays.

Get the busiest expense week all wrapped up

Finance teams don’t need to have a stressful end of year. Here’s some top tips to make getting there as painless as possible:

• Plan for this inevitably busy period: The build up to the festive period occurs every year and is always anticipated to be quite strenuous for finance teams. With this in mind, coming up with a game plan for handling the influx of expenses will help the team to be better prepared. It can also help to determine whether an extra pair of hands will be needed for support.

• Be clear about your expense policy: Make sure everyone knows when, where and how they need to submit their expenses. Send your expense policy around as a friendly reminder and be ruthless – if it’s not on time or compliant with policy, it’s a lump of coal for them. For example, request that employees don’t ‘sandbag’ their expenses as this can effect a business cashflow from a visibility perspective.  Don’t have a policy, check out this expense policy template

Use automation to your advantage: Technology is a huge benefit in cutting down process time and frustration. In fact, 50 per cent of employees agree that automating the expense process is the best way to simplify it. Enable employees on systems and the process before the rush so everyone can work quickly and effectively.

• Review your process: Is there be a better way? Identify weaknesses in your process and spot areas for improvement. Could this be time to automate the expenses process?

• Go paperless: Mountains of paper make the whole expense process more complicated - so why not automate? You won’t have to shuffle around stacks of paper or worry about losing receipts – expense automation digitises the whole process, keep everything organised for finance teams and employees.

Once you've survived the busiest expense week, make it your new year’s resolution to get your expense process into shape - visit www.concur.co.uk/expenseweek to learn more.