Entering Expenses. Yuck!

Okay, we all hate doing expense reports.  You just have to do a search on Twitter for expense reports to see how much everyone hates it.  But we do want to get reimbursed for our expenses and our company wants to make the IRS happy.  So we do have to do it.  The problem is that we have to collect more details about each expense than we want to fiddle with and there is too much paper to shuffle from place to place to get it all documented.

At MBO we are working on solutions for the expense reporting problem for our associates.

We already solve parts of the problem.  We provide our associates with an AMEX card and we automatically download their expense transactions from AMEX.  This reduces the number of receipts required and the amount entry required (but does not remove it all).  We allow expense receipts to be faxed or attached to emails and we use OCR technology to automatically scan the images and attach them to the associate that sent them in so they can be processed.  Once the receipts are attached to an expense item then they are also automatically added to the invoices that are emailed or faxed to the clients.  So we have used technology to solve some parts of the problem.

Still, the entry is tedious and we require a lot of information about each expense.  Why?  Well the IRS wants to make sure we don’t reimburse associates for things that are not real business expense so they have a bunch of documentation requirements.  We also have to collect information to know how to correctly bill the expense to clients.

We have been working to understand the problems our associates have with our current expense entry system.  Understanding the problem can sometimes be the hardest part.  What seems clear to me may not be clear to others.  The problem someone else has is often not clear to me.  Here are some ideas on how to understand the problem (especially when it comes to systems).

Listen to those with the problem. We spent time listening to our associates about the problems they were having.  Focus groups. Forums. Problem Reports.  We learned a lot.  We identified some area that we needed to work on.

Do it yourself. Sometimes things are much clearer when you do them yourself instead of letting others tell you about how they do it.  I tried entering a bunch of expenses and some of the things that our associates had been trying to communicate became clear to me.

Look at other examples.  You can learn about problems in your world by seeing how others have done things.  We looked a several other expense entry systems to learn about things that they had done and that pointed out issues in our system.

We made a list of the problems and then developed solutions for each.  Some were easy solutions, some will take a good bit of system development and some we will have to work on later.  We hope to roll out a set of changes in the next month or so that will solve some of the problems.

It all starts with defining the problem well.  It is pretty easy to say that there is not a problem or that it is not a big problem, but if you listen, try it on your own and learn from others, you might be surprised by both how significant the problem is and the difference it will make if you solve it.

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