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The Transportation Industry’s Guide to Using Automation to Improve Expense Reporting and Document Management
In the transportation industry, whatever business solution you turn to for managing processes like travel and expense reporting needs to work just as well on the go as it does in the office. This is equally true whether your company uses road, rail, air, or water for transportation. You need a way for employees to access a user-friendly system to report their expenses and manage important documents wherever they go.
One of the biggest current trends in the transportation industry is integrating cloud-based systems, including Software-as-a-Service solutions like the ones from NextProcess. The scalability, accessibility, and flexibility of these systems allow your company to streamline and improve essential business processes.
This article is part of NextProcess’s Automate Your Industry blog series. Previous articles covered topics related to retail, health care, and manufacturing industries. Click here to read all posts in this series.
Where Process Automation Helps
Business Process Automation (BPA) software offers a wide variety of benefits to companies. Broadly speaking, BPA provides user-friendly systems to handle essential business processes including accounts payable, travel and expense reporting, and purchasing quickly and smoothly. These systems do not replace employees. Rather, they make jobs easier and free up employees to focus on tasks other than routine paperwork.
Most companies who implement process automation will see the software reduces errors, saves money, and speeds up business processes. You’ll see these sorts of improvements in any industry, and regardless of company size. A small business can benefit from BPA in much the same way that a large corporation can.
For the transportation industry, one of the key advantages of using process automation software comes in the area of travel and expense reporting. When employees travel so much as part of their jobs, you need a simple way for them to report expenses. Going digital with T&E management can also help you simplify record keeping. With so much information already digital once you automate, it’s easy to switch over to keeping records and important documents in a digital format. That saves storage space and makes important records accessible remotely for when employees are out of the office. It also makes it easier to search records and run reports.
The Advantage of Cloud-Based Software
There are different types of automation software. A business might create automation in-house and have their IT department take care of keeping the system running smoothly. Or your business can purchase process automation from a BPA software company. As mentioned earlier, utilizing third-party, cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions is one of the biggest trends in the transportation industry right now.
Contracting with a cloud-based software supplier makes automating business processes much easier for your company. You won’t need to worry about creating, installing, or maintaining software. You also won’t need to keep up with the latest advances in cybersecurity or worry about upgrading to new software as your company grows. The software supplier takes care of all that for you.
Cloud-based software is scalable and easy to work with. You can use the same system for as many employees as you need to. And with NextProcess, there are no extra fees for additional user licenses. You also only pay for what you use and the software scales to your needs. That means you won’t over-pay if there’s a slow month. You also won’t fall behind if there’s an unexpected surge in business. Plus, employees with the correct security permissions can access the software from any location, making it simple to use on the go.
Simplified T&E Reporting
Because employees in the transportation industry are often working while traveling, companies need a good way to handle travel and expense reporting. Saving paper receipts and remembering to file expense reports is a clunky system that many employees find frustrating. It’s also frustrating for the people processing expense reports since there are often missing receipts, and double-checking if a purchase is covered is a tedious process.
Automated, cloud-based T&E solves these problems. Since the system is accessed via the internet, employees can log in and submit expenses wherever they are. They just need to snap a picture of a receipt and upload it with their smartphone. If receipts are already in emails, they just forward the email to the T&E system. That makes it very easy to submit records for expense reports and eliminates the problem of missing receipts.
You get to choose the settings for your T&E automation. NextProcess’s expense report software offers a wide range of customization options and we’ll help you get them set up just the way you want for your business. By setting custom rules in the system, you control which types of expenses are automatically approved and which ones are flagged for manual review. That helps streamline approvals for expenses, making the process faster and easier. And since the system scales to your company’s needs, it works equally well if you have a few dozen employees or a few thousand.
Better Document Management
Every company needs a reliable way to keep track of documents. T&E reports, invoices, purchase orders, and many other documents are essential for keeping a business running smoothly. Being able to sort, file, and find those documents is also important. The more accurate and accessible your records, the easier time you’ll have looking back on past records and planning for the future. It’ll also make audits easier to deal with.For the transportation industry, where important documents may be coming in from all over the country or all over the world, having a way to organize those documents is vital. Digital document management solutions make it easy to store and search all important documents. And if you use a suite of software programs from NextProcess to streamline your business processes, all your BPA software will work together to collect and store financial records in a way that’s easy to access. Full-text search functionality makes it simple to find exactly what information you’re looking for. You can also generate reports easily.
Whether employees are working on the road or in a business office, T&E reporting software, document management, and other financial process automation software can be a major asset to companies in the transportation industry. To talk with one of our financial software experts or schedule a free demo, click here to contact NextProcess. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you have and show you first-hand how our software can help your company.