Invoices and receipts facilitate trade among companies. Even today, much of the receipt information exists on paper or in semi-structured formats like PDFs & images of hard copies. In the absence of an automated expense reporting tool, the traditional way to handle receipt data has been its manual extraction, verification, structuring, editing and then storage, without any guarantee of data integrity and correctness. This is not only super slow but inefficient as well. Even if a traditional OCR scanner is used, it is not smart enough to discern, & contextualize, relatable fields in the ..read more

Video and voice calls – that is the new normal of going about our daily official work since the pandemic hit the world. Surprisingly, before the pandemic, a multitude of companies did not have an effective cell phone expense reimbursement policy in place for their employees. For the lack of crisp phone allowance policy, finance department of a company used to grapple with the vagueness of reported cell phone expenses. The spiking cell phone expenses while conducting business during pandemic forced the corporate to evolve rigorous phone allowance policies to address the cell phone claims report ..read more

During 2014-2019, the global business travel market grew at a CAGR of around 5.1%. Rapid digitization & penetration of IoT in the travel & tourism sector prompted corporations to tie-up with leading business travel companies. These corporations evolved an effective and collaborative travel ecosystem for their teams commuting for business meetings, brand promotions, conferences & corporate events at the local or global level. SMEs were fledging, startups were growing and the future of business travel looked bright. That was, of course, before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted everythi ..read more

Formulating an effective international travel policy for employees is a task necessitating a thorough consideration owing to its implications on future decision making by the organization. International business travels will continue growing in the coming years since, according to Harvard Business Review, face to face requests are 34 times more powerful than a request sent over email. Corporate travel policy guidelines help consolidate various aspects of the business travels of employees, enabling easier reporting & tracking of the travels as well as the related expense resolution. A clear ..read more

It is no mean feat for an organization to actively track & process employee spends. Spends are quite diverse & could be vendor invoices, business travels, utilities, events and so on. Surprisingly, a big chunk of the corporate sector still relies on the traditional way of expense reporting i.e. managing & processing physical expense vouchers. Manual data-entry of hundreds of receipts on a daily basis, without error, is a herculean task. Implementing automated expense reporting & tracking with Zento can revolutionize the financial productivity within your company by allowing the ..read more

Even as technology is revolutionizing management of expense reporting, traditional receipts management is still the norm in some form or the other in companies of all sizes. In the absence of an automated expense reporting solution, tracking & managing receipts can be a tiring, cumbersome & error-prone process. Implementing an expense reimbursement software like Zento can be a crucial game-changer that can increase the financial productivity within your organization. With Zento, your teams don’t need to go through reporting & entering every single receipt manually and also they nee ..read more

A sizeable number of industries today have integrated automated expense reporting in their daily processes, but there is one industry which stands out for still relying largely on the traditional pen-and-paper mode for expense reporting & claim settlement – the construction industry. Many companies in this industry have yet to adopt expense management automation that spans project planning, design, construction, operations and maintenance. Project owners & contractors often use different modes of expense reporting which can lead to errors in spends management and result in cost and sch ..read more

The manual management of business expense processing is usually time and cost intensive for businesses and a pain point for employees & finance/travel/HR teams. Automated expense reporting is catching pace although many companies still lack a proper expense management software in place, unnecessarily putting an avoidable strain on resources. According to a study released by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), processing one expense report takes around 20 minutes at an average cost of $58, not to mention the approximately 18 minutes taken to correct an erroneous report at extra c ..read more

What are T&E expenses? T&E (Travel & Expense OR Travel & Entertainment) expenses are expenses incurred by company employees during business trips or when entertaining clients, prospects and partners to dinners and events. These T&E expenses usually include accommodation, air travel, meals etc. In general, salespeople & business development managers tend to incur the majority of T&E expenses, but not always. Some other profiles that tend to have significant T&E expenses are consultants, partners and analysts. In truth, as evidenced by the fact that T&E can st ..read more

COVID-19 has forced enterprises to employee unorthodox working processes to ensure business continuity, with the biggest departure from normalcy being Work-From-Home policies. Business travel, client meetings, promotional events, tradeshows etc. are all suspended. Small and medium businesses – which account for the livelihoods of most of the world’s population – are arguably the worst hit. It’s a unique struggle, insofar as its common to both business owners and employees, virtually no industry as a whole is spared. In this article, we enumerate some of the challenges being faced by businesses ..read more