By Matt Goss, managing director, ANZ, SAP Concur.

Keeping valuable staff members is crucial for organisations, especially in a tough economic climate. Replacing staff members costs time and money and can set businesses back in terms of recovery and growth. Depending on the metrics used, the cost of replacing a staff member could be as high as nine months of their salary. For highly skilled employees, the costs could soar to twice their annual salary. And, these are just the costs that can be calculated.¹

Employees leave their roles for all kinds of reasons, many of which may have nothing to do with the business. However, most of the reasons for leaving a job are complaints that could be directly addressed by the company. For example, if employees feel unchallenged or bored, have little opportunity to use their skills and experience, or feel like their work isn’t contributing to the organisation’s goals, they may be likely to look for other roles.²

Disengaged employees are unlikely to be productive and can contribute to a deteriorating culture, which affects everyone in the organisation. By contrast, highly engaged teams show 21 per cent greater profitability, according to Gallup.³ The more engaged workers are, the more productive and successful they are. Organisations have long been aware of the importance of engagement and have tried everything from providing free meals and on-site childcare to offering flexible hours and opportunities for employees to socialise. However, a Gartner report has revealed that, despite the global attention on the importance of employee experience, only 13 per cent of employees indicate they are currently satisfied with their experience.⁴

Improving employee engagement takes more than surface-level perks or limited-time campaigns. Team members need to feel valued in their roles and they need to believe they are being set up to succeed. There are many ways to do this. One simple way is to reduce the amount of manual, time consuming, and tediously repetitive work that employees have to do.

By automating expense and invoice processes, for example, business can give employees more time back in their day to spend on creative, strategic, and valuable tasks, boosting their engagement and productivity. With automation, employees can capture expenses as they happen, use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to enter the details of the expenditure, then automatically compare invoices against purchase orders and submit the expense report immediately, regardless of whether they’re at home or in the office. With expense policies written into the system, automation helps employees to stay within the corporate policy, preventing mistakes and fraudulent activity.

There are five ways an automated invoice and expense management system can help organisations empower employees, leading to deeper engagement and better retention:

1.        Increase productivity
An automated invoice and expense management system can improve employee experiences by streamlining tedious manual processes such as logging, approving, and paying invoices, as well as reporting. It gives employees flexible ways to automatically capture and store all invoices electronically, supporting all approvals-related communications in the system and avoiding bottlenecks created by manual processing.

By eliminating the administrative aspects of their jobs, employees will be given more time in their day to contribute more meaningfully to the business. According to a recent Forrester study, a focus on the tools employees regularly use is critical to delivering good employee experiences, as it lets team members spend their valuable time doing meaningful work that fulfils them.⁵

2.        Increase accuracy
Manual processing is mundane, time consuming, and error prone. An automated system can capture invoices electronically using OCR technology, use two- and three-way matching to pair the invoice to its associated purchase order (PO), and then accurately record it in the accounts payable system, which then flows through to the accounting system used by the business. This reduces the need for manual processing, meaning the risk of human error is immediately eliminated. The system only requires manual input for verification if an invoice is flagged as not matching any POs or approved suppliers, or if the amount is higher than the approved purchase amount.

3.        Improve spend visibility
By automating the entire invoice management process from purchase request to payment, managers can gain full visibility and control at every step. Visibility lets businesses track processes and company spend in real time, and identify revenue and savings opportunities for the next project.

4.        Ensures compliance
An automated invoice and expense management system can help avoid any employee spend occurring outside company policies by embedding those policies into the system. This means that employees cannot submit expense claims that are outside company policy without further verification from the finance team. The system will stop them before the expense can be incurred, saving money for the organisation and avoiding the frustration that occurs when employees incur an expense and can’t be reimbursed for it.

Additionally, with expenses uploaded instantly, finance teams can identify mistakes and suspicious activity as they occur. This prevents fraudulent activity from going unnoticed and also allows honest mistakes to be reconciled quicker, reducing financial damage.

5.        Data-informed decisions
Automated invoice and expense management provide instant reporting capabilities that deliver strong return on investment in terms of accuracy and time saved, allowing finance teams to easily establish and track key metrics. Once analysed, these metrics inform payment decisions to optimise company cash flow, and help management make forward-looking, real-time strategic decisions. This positions businesses to improve their liquidity, eliminate excess spending, and mitigate potential funding gaps to ultimately generate higher profits.

Manual expense and invoice systems are time consuming and error-prone, creating bottlenecks that can impact employee engagement and productivity. An automated expense and invoice management system empowers employees to move beyond menial tasks to focus on value-adding activities. This helps improve their engagement, letting workers contribute in ways that are fulfilling for them, leading to better staff retention and, ultimately, improving the organisation’s bottom line.