Look! An unsubmitted expense report!
Are you someone who often forgets to submit expense reports on time? Worry not, Gorilla Expense has got you covered.
Adding to its list of advanced features Gorilla Expense brings another simple, yet powerful ‘Reminders’ feature. A feature that proactively alerts you when expense reports are due, keeping your team accountable and helping you maintain an accurate expense record.
Based on the business needs, there are 5 types of reminders:
Not Created and Pending Submission Reminder: This reminds end-users to create and submit an expense report at least once during a predefined time period (weekly, bi-monthly, monthly)
Created Not Submitted Reminder: If you are someone who creates the reports but forgets to submit them, then this will remind you to submit your expense reports that have been collecting dust for a long time now.
Pending Approval Reminder: To the managers who have been sitting on the approval requests, this reminder will nudge you till you process all those pending approvals.
Unsubmitted Bank Transaction Reminder: It will remind end-users to complete those credit card transactions and assign them to a report before it is too late.
Pending Approval Reminder (Escalation): Designed for managers who take forever to approve expenses. This will escalate the approval request through the right channels, ensuring the reports get approved and the situation escalates.
Select either of the categories and watch how it would prevent backlogs, ensure timely approvals, eliminate discrepancies, and resolve approval delays.
If you want to understand this feature in detail, then click here.
Gorilla Expense has been working tirelessly to provide you with the best-in-class, and hassle-free features that make your expense management process easy like a breeze.
Adding to its advanced features, Gorilla Expense introduces the “Enriched Vendor Feature”, an AI-driven automation that standardizes vendor data identifies variations and aliases, and links them to unique identifiers.
This feature streamlines processes related to vendor management and seamlessly integrates with your expense reporting and invoice systems. It enhances the expense management process by providing deeper insights and capabilities related to vendor interactions and transactions. It also consolidates vendor spending across multiple platforms like expense reporting, credit cards, and ERP.
Through this blog let us explore the Enriched Vendor Feature in detail.
This feature entails the following characteristics:
Vendor Information Standardization: Standardize vendor information text-matching or natural language processing techniques, to identify and consolidate vendor data using AI algorithms. For instance, it appears to recognize variations like “American Airlines, Inc.,” “American Air,” and “American Air” as referring to the same vendor, which is “American Airlines.”
Matching to BC Vendor ID: Associate the standardized vendor name with a unique identifier, such as, “BC Vendor ID 9999 – American Air.” This association helps in tracking and managing vendor information efficiently with Business Central.
Expense Reporting Integration: When a user creates and submits an expense report in Gorilla Expense, the feature can identify expenses related to the vendor, such as “American Airlines,” and associate them with the standardized vendor name and ID as maintained in Business Central.
Streamlining Purchase Invoice Process: The feature extends to the purchase invoice screen in a system like “Business Central”. When the approved expense reports get exported to Business Central as Purchase Invoice, the integration will populate “Vendor 9999” (referring to “American Airlines”) in a custom field on the invoice line. The same field gets auto-populated on the invoice lines when a Purchase Invoice is created manually within Business Central. A consolidated vendor spend report can be then run which reads this field and reports spending by vendor more accurately.
Be it advanced analytics, seamless integrations, or enhanced customization, the Enriched Vendor Feature translates into enhanced efficiency, informed decision-making, and improved customer experiences.
Unlock a new era of possibilities and advancements in expense management with Gorilla Expense. Spend less time on manual tasks and let the AI-powered vendor management help your team get the most value from the vendors.
Learn more about our 30+ best-in-class features that help make expense management a smooth and hassle-free experience here.
Picture this: You’re an organization on the move, constantly traversing the globe to expand your business, meet new and existing clients, and make million-dollar deals. Your employees, your greatest assets, are the ones frequently jet-setting across time zones, navigating unfamiliar territories, and dealing with the unforeseen. Now, as much as you trust your team to represent your company with excellence, you also bear a responsibility – a responsibility to ensure their safety, security, and compliance with your financial rules. That’s where the intersection of expense policy creation and travel risk management becomes crucial.
Connecting the Dots: How Your Expenses Shape Your Safety
Here, two primary objectives take center stage: compliance and risk mitigation. Your expense policies and travel risk management strategies, when aligned seamlessly, can forge a powerful shield against the uncertainties that often accompany business travel.
Expense policies are the backbone of financial prudence, setting guidelines and limits to manage your company’s financial resources efficiently. They ensure that expenses are documented, controlled, and conform to regulatory standards. But what if we told you that these very policies can also serve as the foundation for safeguarding your employees during their travels? That’s right! The overlap between expense policies and travel risk management is more significant than you might imagine.
In this blog, we’ll dive deep into the symbiotic relationship between policy creation and risk management, highlighting their common objectives and exploring how they can work in tandem to create a safer and more accountable travel environment for your team.
Expense Policies as the Basis for Travel Safety Guidelines
In the wild world of corporate management, expense policy creation and travel risk management share a fascinating common ground. Both disciplines revolve around three key pillars: compliance, transparency, and control.
Compliance: Expense policies, the rulebook of financial conduct, ensure that your organization’s spending habits dance gracefully within the boundaries of regulations and guidelines. Travel risk management, on the other hand, is the safety marshal ensuring your globetrotting employees adhere to safety protocols and legal requirements. Picture them as two sides of the same coin; when they come together, you forge a shield of compliance, reducing the risk of non-compliance issues.
Transparency: Expense policies promote financial transparency by requiring employees to meticulously document their expenses, making it easy to track and account for every dollar spent. Travel risk management enhances transparency by providing visibility into the whereabouts and safety of your employees while they travel. When both aspects are aligned, you get a comprehensive view of your organization’s activities, financial health, and the safety of your team members.
Control: Expense policies are all about controlling spends and managing budgets effectively. They empower your organization to allocate resources efficiently and prevent overspending. Travel risk management, likewise, focuses on control, but in a different context – controlling potential risks and hazards. When these controls are harmonized, you not only safeguard your financial resources but also protect your employees from unforeseen dangers during their journeys.
Covering All Bases: How Comprehensive Policies Keep Finances and Safety in Check
Your organization’s expense policies can serve as the cornerstone upon which you can build a robust framework for travel safety guidelines:-
Expense Categories and Safety: Expense policies categorize costs, like accommodation and meals. Now, extend these categories to cover safety-related expenses. Allocate a safety budget within your policy to cover emergency medical kits, travel insurance, or secure transportation options.
Pre-Approval and Risk Assessment: Ever thought of extending your pre-approval process to cover safety too? Before an employee embarks on a business trip, let the travel risk management experts assess the journey. Based on safety criteria, they grant pre-approval. This way, your employees are suitably equipped, and potential risks are minimized.
Reporting and Incident Management: Expense reporting and incident reporting can share the same stage. When an employee encounters a safety-related incident during travel, they can report it through the same platform. It streamlines reporting and ensures safety incidents are addressed with the urgency they deserve.
By infusing safety considerations into your expense policies, you craft a holistic approach to corporate travel that prioritizes both ease and employee well-being. This isn’t just about safeguarding your employees; it’s also about showcasing your unwavering commitment to their welfare, which can lead to happier, more dedicated teams.
Taking Flight: Inspiring a Safer, More Accountable Travel Culture
A well-rounded corporate policy isn’t confined to financial regulations alone; it embraces safety as an integral part of its framework. Comprehensive policies strike a balance between fiscal responsibility and employee protection. Here’s how they do it:
Clear Guidelines: Comprehensive policies are crystal clear. They lay down the law for your employees, detailing expense limits and safety protocols without any ambiguity. When employees grasp the financial and safety dimensions of their travels, they’re more likely to stay on the right path.
Education and Training: These policies are not just words on paper; they’re educators. Employees receive training on financial best practices and safety measures. They become adept at recognizing potential risks and handling them like seasoned adventurers.
Flexibility: Comprehensive policies aren’t rigid. They understand that one size doesn’t fit all. So, they offer flexibility for unique circumstances. An employee traveling to a high-risk zone might have different safety requirements than someone on a bleisure trip. These policies adapt without losing control and compliance.
Aligning expense policies with travel risk management isn’t just about bridging the gap between two distinct areas of corporate management. It’s about creating a unified strategy that promotes compliance, transparency, and control while ensuring the safety and security of your most valuable assets—your employees.
By recognizing the common threads that tie these disciplines together, your organization can embark on a journey towards a safer, more accountable, and financially responsible approach to business travel.
Gorilla Expense works tirelessly to provide its customers with seamless and efficient features that will help mitigate errors and increase productivity.
To learn more about the features offered by Gorilla Expense, click here.
Leave behind the hassle of managing expenses for multiple customers, jobs, and tasks. With Gorilla Expense’s Code to Job feature, get the flexibility of managing the customers and their respective jobs/projects.
When you log in, you will get the relevant job options mapped to the customer on the ‘Add New Expense’ screen. The system automatically displays the corresponding job tasks when you select a job or project, and you can map multiple job tasks to a single job or project.
Jump on the link here to understand the Code to Job feature in detail.
Gorilla Expense works tirelessly to provide its customers with seamless and efficient features that will help mitigate errors and increase productivity.
To learn more about the features offered by Gorilla Expense, click here.
Dealing with expenses in different currencies can be tiresome and confusing, but not when you have Gorilla Expense with you. Introducing the Multi-currency feature. This feature allows you to automate currency conversions using pre-defined exchange rates or fetching real-time rates from the internet when necessary.
Let the Currency Master handle the exchange rates between different currencies.
Forgot to maintain the exchange rate? No worries! Our integration can retrieve the current exchange rates from the internet and perform the currency conversion accurately.
With Gorilla Expense, experience seamless cross-border money transactions and expense management anytime and anywhere.
Are you tired of the hassle of manual categorization? Want to enjoy accurate expense allocation with ease? If your answer to these questions is yes, then you need to check out Gorilla Expense’s Code to Dimensions feature.
With this feature, users can pick the right department or business unit for each expense they enter. It also allows you to maintain and enable multiple dimensions similar to the ones configured in the accounting system. The application is flexible enough to allow for the maintenance of a mapping between these dimensions. Organize and sort your expenses by department, business unit, and cost center.
Allocate expenses to business units effortlessly with accurate expense categorization.
Effortlessly select cost centers based on business units with simplified cost center selection.
Assign expenses to auto-populated cost centers seamlessly through streamlined expense mapping.
Track and report your expenses based on different dimensions to gain accurate insights into your company’s finances. Want to know more about this feature? Read our detailed guide here.
Gorilla Expense has been working tirelessly to provide you with the best-in-class, and hassle-free features that make your expense management process easy like a breeze.
As the world of business continues to evolve, so too does the role of the CFO. In the past, CFOs were primarily responsible for managing the company’s finances. However, today’s CFOs are increasingly involved in shaping the company’s spending culture.
Spending culture refers to the way in which a company approaches spending money. It includes the company’s expense policies, the way in which employees are reimbursed for expenses, and the overall attitude towards spending within the company. With rumors of recession and widening income parity, it is more important than ever for businesses to have a united spending culture. This will help businesses to weather the storm and emerge stronger on the other side.
Deloitte’s categorization of CFO orientations—responder, challenger, architect, and transformer—offers valuable insights into the distinct impacts these orientations can have on an organization, specifically its spending culture. While each type brings a unique approach to strategy development and execution, here are my assumptions about how these orientations may influence spending culture based on their core characteristics.
Responder: CFOs with a responder orientation are likely to impact spending culture by emphasizing accountability and data-driven decision-making. By focusing on quantitative analysis, they can shape spending culture by establishing clear guidelines and metrics to evaluate expenses, promoting a culture of financial responsibility and efficiency.
Challenger: CFOs with a challenger orientation play a pivotal role in minimizing risk and ensuring returns on capital investments. By critically examining the risks and expected returns, these CFOs promote a culture of rigorous evaluation and scrutiny when it comes to spending decisions. They may encourage a conservative approach to expenses, requiring justifications and business cases for significant expenditures, and fostering a culture of prudence and financial discipline.
Architect: CFOs with an architect orientation collaborate closely with business leaders to shape strategy choices and maximize value. In terms of spending culture, they may emphasize the importance of strategic investments and foster a culture that values long-term value creation over short-term cost-cutting.
Transformer: CFOs with a transformer orientation act as lead partners to the CEO, actively shaping and executing future strategy. They may challenge traditional spending norms and encourage experimentation to achieve growth and profitability.
It’s important to note that these assumptions are generalizations, as individual CFOs may exhibit characteristics from multiple orientations or adapt their approach based on the organization’s needs. The impact on spending culture will depend on the CFO’s ability to effectively communicate their vision, gain buy-in from key stakeholders, and create alignment between financial strategies and organizational goals.
It is crucial for CFOs to pay attention to spending culture, as a poorly managed culture can lead to unnecessary costs that impact profitability. Traditional expense policies often constrain employees, leading to confusion and frustration. To foster a positive spending culture, CFOs should design policies that align with company culture, support strategic goals, and empower employees to make responsible spending decisions. There are a number of things that CFOs can do to shape their company’s spending culture. These include:
Setting clear expense policies. The company’s expense policies should be clear and easy to understand. They should also be fair and consistent.
Encouraging employee participation. Employees should be involved in the development of the company’s spending culture. They should be encouraged to share their ideas and suggestions.
Setting a good example. CFOs should set a good example by spending money wisely. They should also be transparent about their spending habits.
Using technology to manage expenses. There are a number of technology solutions that can help companies to manage their expenses more effectively. These solutions can help to track expenses, identify areas where savings can be made, and improve compliance with company policies.
Building an expense management culture requires aligning spending practices with company culture.
Netflix: Netflix’s expense policy is only five words long: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.” This policy reflects the company’s high-trust environment and its expectation that employees will spend company money wisely.
Basecamp: Basecamp has no spending limits or pre-approvals for expenses. Instead, employees are trusted to manage their own expenses responsibly. This approach has led to significant cost savings for the company.
Salesforce: Salesforce uses a customer relationship management (CRM) system to track and manage expenses. This system gives the company real-time visibility into its spending, which helps it to make more informed decisions about where to allocate its resources.
These are just a few examples of how CFOs can shape spending culture. By taking a thoughtful and strategic approach to this issue, CFOs can help their companies to save money, improve profitability, and create a more efficient and productive workplace.
In times of economic hardship, it is more important than ever for businesses to have a united spending culture. This means that everyone in the company should be aware of the company’s spending policies and should be committed to spending wisely. A united spending culture can create a more equitable workplace. When everyone is aware of the company’s spending policies and is committed to spending wisely, it can help to create a more level playing field for employees. This can help to reduce resentment and build a more cohesive workforce.
The role of the CFO in shaping spending culture is likely to become even more important in the future. As businesses become more globalized and complex, the need for clear and consistent expense policies will become increasingly important.
CFOs who are able to successfully shape their company’s spending culture will be well-positioned to help their companies achieve their strategic goals.
Dividing costs among several departments and cost centers is challenging. But not when you have Gorilla Expense’s Split Feature. This feature allows you to split a single expense into multiple expenses for different expense types and departments, cost centers, or projects.
It also enables the user to split either by amount or by percentage as per the requirement of the user. This makes expense management a hassle-free process for the user and the management team.
Check out ‘How to use Split Feature on Web Application’ here.
Gorilla Expense aims at fulfilling the needs of its client by introducing seamless, efficient, and accurate features, thereby being committed to its mission of helping its client stay ahead of the curve.
*ting* You received a notification from Gorilla Expense! Put behind the hassle of constantly checking and re-checking the status of your reports or timesheets. Get notified immediately by receiving email or text message alerts when:
Your timesheets or reports are accepted or refused
Credit card expenses are imported
Your reports are exported for payment
Get instant reminders to submit and approve reports and timesheets, as well. Gorilla Expense’s expense reporting solution keeps you informed every step of the way.
Simplify your workflows and see how we can help you manage your expenses with ease. At Gorilla Expense, we work tirelessly to provide our clients with the best-in-class features that help boost productivity.
Are out-of-hand expenses driving you crazy? Well, not anymore! Introducing the Receipt Policy Feature. With this feature in your system, ensure that your employees are following all applicable laws and regulations, therefore enforcing compliance.
The Receipt Policy Feature by Gorilla Expense ensures that employees either attach receipts or justify the missing receipts when the amount limit exceeds.
As a result, bogus claims are prevented and rules and regulations are ensured.
All of this is fruitful only when an effective receipt policy is created. Learn how to create an effective receipt policy.
Over the years, Gorilla Expense has been working tirelessly on creating seamless and efficient features that let you manage expenses like a pro. To know more about such features, click here.
