Stampli Introduces Expense Management Solution for Accounts Payable Teams

Many businesses operate with an inefficient expense management process. These firms process expenses using hardcopy receipts, spreadsheet data entry, and multiple emails and phone calls to gather information. Companies that use a largely manual process for expense management invest more time, generate more errors, and operate with a higher risk of fraud.

Stampli is excited to introduce Stampli Expenses to streamline expense data collection, approvals, payments, and expense reporting. Our new solution reduces manual data entry, automates the approval process, and ensures expenses are recorded quickly and accurately. Stampli Expenses frees up your staff’s time to work on tasks that add more value.

Expense Management Challenges

AP teams need an efficient process to collect receipts, assign spending to GL accounts, and post data to the ERP. AP staff also must pay the corporate credit card bills, and possibly reimburse employees for out-of-pocket expenses. Businesses that use outdated methods to process and manage expenses find themselves making more errors, struggling to communicate, and spending far more time on AP than is necessary.

Managing Expenses in Today’s World

To illustrate, assume Sturdy Tools sells products to retailers across the US. Sturdy’s 20 salespeople each use a company credit card, and expenses are approved by the sales manager. Here is Sturdy’s expense management process:

• Submitting Receipts: Each salesperson keeps physical receipts, then uses a spreadsheet template to record expense information. The salesperson emails a copy of each receipt and the spreadsheet to the AP department, and the AP team follows up by email or by phone.

• Approvals & coding: AP emails documentation to the proper approver. If a particular expense is in dispute, the approver emails AP, and the expense is not posted until the issue is resolved. AP codes the expenses to the proper expense accounts.

• Payments: When the credit card statement is received at month-end, AP compares each credit card transaction to a receipt, and follows up to obtain any missing receipts to post the expenses. This process often requires AP to post adjusting entries. 

Sturdy Tool’s expense management process is time-consuming, inefficient, and increases the risk of errors.

Problems with the current system

Manual processes require more time to communicate, and records are often lost or never sent to the right person. Consider these issues:

• Incoming emails: The receipts and expense reports are not sent to a single email address, causing emails to get lost. In addition, receipts may not be legible, and emails may include wrong attachments.

• Expense coding: Salespeople typically complete expense reports after returning from a sales trip. Receipts may get lost before the expense report is completed, resulting in expense coding delays.

• Approvals: Emails to approvers may go unread, or not include the correct attachments. AP cannot easily monitor the approval status of each expense.

• Credit card statements: AP must wait until the credit card statement is available before receipts can be compared to the statement. This creates more work for AP during the month-end close and the inability to review expenses that may be fraudulent.

The AP team’s goal is to enable employees to make purchases, while maintaining control over spending, minimizing time-consuming, manual tasks, and reducing low-value work. 

Introducing Stampli Expenses

Stampli allows your business to post transactions, manage receipts, and process expenses in one platform. Stampli Expenses offers a more integrated process with fewer steps to complete, allowing cardholders to submit receipts, request and receive approvals, code expenses, and sync back to your ERP. This solution is the only corporate credit card with Stampli inside, which provides end-to-end management over all employee expenses.

Gain full control over employee expenses

Stampli’s built-in expense approval workflow ensures that AP has full control over spending. Employees can be assigned a Stampli Card for one-time use, multi-use, or cyclical expenses. With Stampli expense cards, you control how much the cardholder can spend, and the specific vendor. AP can deactivate or pause card use as needed, and set a dollar amount when receipts are required.

Effortless expense management

Use Stampli Expenses to ensure that employees are following company policies, submitting expenses for approval, and track cardholders responsible for each purchase. 

When a cardholder requests a Stampli Card for expenses, they can select the appropriate expense approver (typically their manager). Stampli provides auto-reminders for cardholders to submit receipts and for approvers to review employee purchases, so that spending is approved in a timely manner.

Cardholders can upload receipts into their personal Receipt Library immediately after a purchase and match the document with an expense at a future date. The Receipt Library houses all copies of the cardholder’s receipts, so they don’t get lost and can be easily accessed later. Stampli automatically matches receipts to a credit card transaction if certain criteria is met so cardholders do not have to — eliminating significant time that was once spent on creating expense reports.

Using Stampli reduces paperwork clutter, and cardholders have less information to input for each expense. Cardholders spend less time on expense reporting, so they can focus on higher priority tasks that add more value to the business.

Improved expense visibility

Review Stampli Card spending instantly after purchases are made rather than waiting until month-end. Expense data is captured automatically each time the card is used. The AP team can review transactions as they occur, and follow up on questionable card use that may be fraudulent. Businesses don’t have to wait until the monthly credit card statement arrives or expenses are submitted to review transactions.

Stampli Expenses gives you full control over expense management, and removes the need for employees to use personal credit cards for business expenses. No more expense spreadsheets, physical receipts, or expense reimbursements to employees. You’re in a better position to scale the business using a fully automated expense management system, and earn rebates on credit card usage.

Use the Industry Leader in AP Automation

Stampli’s end-to-end AP platform gives you full control and visibility over all your corporate spending from invoices to payments to corporate cards — all in one place.

Stampli uses AI technology to capture invoice data in real time, and learns your accounting process for accurate coding and approval routing. Use Stampli Expenses and Stampli Card to automate card use, receipt collection, expense posting, and approvals. Stampli customers save time, while closely monitoring all expenses as they occur.

Don’t just manage spend, control it with Stampli.