The challenge
A leading global energy company was working with an outdated paper-based expense system which was slow, disorganised and problematic. With a workforce of 4,900 employees across 20 countries, this had a significant impact on productivity and cost-efficiency for the organisation.
Employees travelling on business not only had to spend a large amount of time submitting and managing their expenses, they were also prone to losing their receipts. This resulted in delays with processing expense claims and the employees being reimbursed. It also significantly increased the workload of the finance department, with the additional required manual receipt checks against the corporate policy.
The company wanted a more efficient and transparent expense system that eased the workload of its employees, provided greater visibility of employee spending and improved financial reporting.
How did Ricoh’s Expense Manager help?
Ricoh replaced the paper-based, stapled-on receipt system with an automated, integrated digital workflow. The new system enabled those travelling on business to immediately scan in receipts at the point of purchase to automatically generate expense reports for approval. The Ricoh Expense Manager was fully integrated with the company’s payroll system (Sage) to seamlessly automate payment and improve financial tracking and reporting.
Training and ongoing support was provided for the company’s sales and IT teams to enable the company to become autonomous in the deployment of the training, and to help employees quickly adapt to the new system, for a smooth onboarding process.
The benefits
- Time spent on managing expenses has been reduced by 5 hours per employee per month, leading to higher productivity across the business.
- The new automated process ensures all expenses are compliant with corporate policy, reducing fraud and the administrative burden on the finance team.
- Management now have complete visibility of their teams’ spending in real-time, both at an individual and group level.
- Overall, time spent completing tasks relating to reporting expenses has been reduced by 80%.
