School Expense Automation
Education institutes usually share similar attributes to commercial organizations, like a large number of employees, dispersed teams, and controlled budgets.
In general, these institute’s expenses like travel and other expenses are funded by grants and scholarships. This is to be controlled by different regulations.
This results in the complexity of the expense reporting of institutions. Along with demands of specialized solutions for complying with the grant regulations, and other government-related regulations.
As institutes grow in size, and expenses increase, challenges arise for the accounts team in controlling expenses.
Must be remembered, designing and enforcing policies for cost control, and compliance is important for schools, which is possible only through Expense Management Automation.
Drawbacks in Manual expense system:
Schools face several issues in Submitting, processing, and paying expenses. Here are few drawbacks in the present manual expense management system
- Paper-based process:
The manual reporting process usually works like maintaining receipts, spreadsheet creation, printing the same and adding receipts to the spreadsheet, and then forwarding the same to the finance department for approval.
This process at times proven to be cumbersome, and usually labor-intensive, wasting precious time and resources of the institution. - Scope for Errors:
Manual processes are usually prone to error, even a single wrong entry can have huge implications in the general ledger code, which may lead to serious consequences with the regulatory authorities. - Reimbursement Delay for Travel expenses:
Inability in creating the list of expenses during travels often leads to delay in reimbursement of travel costs.
Sometimes this can actually frustrate the senior-most staff of the institutions like heads, teachers, and others who work outside of their home campuses. - A chance for Fraud:
According to experts in the USA alone, every year manual reporting is entertaining a fraud of nearly $2.8 billion in losses. This is resulting in a state of security, along with the impossibility to track the source of error.
How Automation can be the savior?
By all means, automating repetitive tasks is going to save tons of time and resources for any organization.
Especially for the schools that rely on loads of paper, and age-old solutions, that don’t coordinate with each other automation can be a game-changer that can increase efficiency.
Here are four major benefits of shifting towards an automated expense management system.
Lower Costs:
A manual expense report usually involves a team of staff working on the task, wasting a lot of time and other resources.
Automated expense reporting on the other hand usually involves significantly less staff employed, that too only for data entry and reports sharing. This can help in reducing the maintenance cost of schools.
Time is Money:
The manual process usually involves tracking each and every expense, followed by collecting and organizing receipts, generate an expense report, and then sharing the report with the accounts manager.
Reimbursements can be possible only when there is approval from the manager, which consumes a huge amount of time.
On the contrary automated expense, reporting makes, each and every attribute updated. The system enables to share of reports in real-time. This makes the approval process significantly faster.
Better Accessibility:
Going digital ensures all the processes are executed fastly, and all the required info is available at your fingertips. Automated expense reporting can help in accessing and tracking expenses at any time.
Error-free:
In general, correction of mistakes in manual expense reporting is a major pain for the accounting teams.
Mistake correction requires the team to wait till all the corrections are updated. Notably, these corrections are again to be approved by the manager. This usually consumes lots of time.
On the contrary, an automated process corrects the mistakes in real-time. Updates and approvals are done in a matter of minutes.
The system also ensures credibility and security in your existing accounting system.
Edecofy’s smart school expense automation system can help your institute to reap the benefits of automation. Looking for more details? Please visit: https://www.edecofy.com or you can also reach us at contact@edecofy.com
