- 5 minute read

Expense Reimbursements: What's the Best Way to Handle Them?

When dealing with expense reimbursements, it's likely you've come across a few issues:

  • Filling in expense reports take up a lot of employee and manager time
  • Employees often have to pay out of pocket and wait 30+ days for a reimbursement
  • Using paper receipts can make it hard to keep track of expenses and control spending
  • Employee rarely reach expense policies and are more likely to make mistakes.

If you want a simple and straightforward way to manage expense reimbursements, your best bet is to use a spend management platform. Why?

Here are a few reasons:

Give your employees company cards

If currently there’s only one company card in the entire team and everyone has to go through the person who handles it in order to spend, tracking quickly gets chaotic. In a world where people work remotely, this is far from an ideal solution.

Not only is it incredibly time-consuming for all parties involved, but it doesn’t set any spending limits whatsoever.

With a spend management solution, all your employees have their own cards and you can monitor all transactions from one dashboard.

Set spending limits

You cannot manage expenses properly if there isn’t an easy way of controlling and setting limits. As we mentioned before, this is especially true if you’re a new company: the more you spend, the shorter your runway will be.

Spend management solutions let you set spending limits on your employee company cards. That means you can rest assured your employees are not overspending and can quickly see what each source of spend is.

Avoid use paper receipts

Paper receipts are a pain. You end up with a box full of paper, and it’s either you, your accountants, or your CFO that has to deal with the headache of sorting through it all at the end of the month.

With a spend management solution, your employees just need to take a photo of the receipt and throw it away. No need to keep any paper.

Speed up the process and handle it all from one place

A spend management platform provides you with a one-stop-shop for expense management. Currently, you might have one app to help manage expenses, a credit card for big expenses, and then a card like Amex for cashback. When your employees start spending on providers, computers, and office space, managing and tracking can quickly get complicated. Integrations between apps and cards don’t work, which results in a lot of manual submissions.

Spend management solutions flip this on its head: when everything happens under one roof, you and your employees use one solution for spending, tracking, and cashback. Expense reimbursement and tracking suddenly happen in a matter of seconds, not days.

You may also like: Payhawk vs Spendesk vs Soldo vs Jeeves: Which One's Best For You

How to set up expense reimbursements with a spend management platform like Jeeves

Jeeves is a spend management platform combined with a credit card. That means you get all the benefits of having a centralised spend management dashboard as well as using a company credit card.

1. Sign up for free

The Jeeves spend management platform is free to sign up to, and all cards are free to issue. That means you can try it as a spend management platform without risking or committing to anything.

Sign up to Jeeves and once you’re accepted, you’ll be offered the option to open global business accounts in CAD, USD, GBP, and/or EUR. From there, you can upload funds to the currency of your choice, which will ultimately fund your card and payment expenses.

2. Request your employee cards

Once you’re up and running on your Jeeves account, you can order your Jeeves card for you and your employees from the dashboard for free. There’s a handy user management system that allows you to set spending limits, view transactions and more.

3. Spend with 0% interest

You and your employees will be able to spend anywhere that accepts Mastercard business credit cards, and you’ll be able to see all the transactions as they go through on your dashboard. You’ll be able to see the merchant, total cost and time and date of purchase. You and your employees can spend up to their set card limit.

With Jeeves, you won’t have to pay any interest (as long as you pay off your bill every 30 days). Nor are there annual, account or platform fees.

You’ll be able to monitor your transactions on a regular basis and add notes, receipts, and more. At the end of the month, you’ll receive a statement with all the information needed. Your accountant won’t have to deal with 20 different expense statements from different employees: it’s all consolidated into one!

4. Earn 1% cashback

One of the large benefits of being a corporate card provider is that we're able to offer much larger rewards. At Jeeves, we currently offer up to 1% cashback on all card spend. With that amount of cashback, you'll notice a difference in your bottom line.

5. Free physical and virtual cards

Jeeves customers’ are a big fan of virtual cards, because they enable even more precise tracking on spending. With our virtual business credit cards, you can set up a separate virtual card for every recurring expense. For Facebook ads, for example, you can set up a virtual card and set a spending limit of £5,000. You won’t ever spend more than £5k, and the card resets automatically every month. That means it’s a lot easier to track transactions, and turn cards on and off when you stop using them.

Our customers also love our free worldwide shipping on our physical cards. They are free for each employee and is delivered within 3-5 business days.

If you want to truly fix the expense reimbursement problem, then your best bet is to go with a spend management solution. The added benefit of using one like Jeeves is that you’ll have free physical and virtual cards, great cashback, and no APR or annual fees. And if you start with a tool like this from the beginning, it’ll be a lot easier to scale. Your accountants and CFOs will thank you for it.