Employee Expense Claims: Fixing a Process That Frustrates Everyone

A typical expense claim at a company with manual processes takes between 8 and 18 days to reimburse. Staff find it frustrating. Finance teams find it repetitive. And yet the process often stays unchanged for years because it feels like a low-priority problem compared to the close or audit prep.

The actual cost of a broken expense process

Beyond staff frustration, manual expense workflows carry real financial risk. Duplicate claims, missing receipts, and policy violations are significantly harder to catch when claims arrive as scanned PDFs or handwritten forms. A company processing 120 claims per month can easily lose 15 to 20 hours of finance time to chasing, correcting, and re-approving.

This webinar follows the expense workflow redesign done by an HR services firm with 4 offices and 180 staff. Their previous process involved a paper form, a shared email inbox, and a spreadsheet log that no one trusted. The redesign took 5 weeks and brought average reimbursement time down from 14 days to 4.

Tools, policy, and change management

The session covers both the technical side (tool selection, receipt capture, approval routing) and the human side (how to get staff to actually use the new process correctly from week 1). Policy clarity turns out to be as important as the software choice.

We include a 20-minute segment on expense policy design, specifically which categories need per-diem limits, which need receipt thresholds, and how to write rules that reduce ambiguity for both staff and approvers.

A participant from a previous cohort noted that switching to a mobile-first capture tool alone reduced their incomplete submission rate from roughly 1 in 3 claims to fewer than 1 in 12.