Expense claims are an administration burden for all businesses. What should be a simple task of reimbursing employees can quickly slide into a paper-filled back-office nightmare. Xero Expenses was launched last week to streamline this process.
This new tool takes a modern, mobile-first approach – giving visibility into how money is spent in your business, while simplifying a complex, time consuming and paper-ridden process.
Because of the number of people involved in the expense claim process – the employee claiming the expense, the staff member responsible for approving and processing the expense, and the person who pays the expense – it can often become a disjointed and time consuming workflow.
Employees can now simply input expenses into the Xero Expenses app, and have the expense automatically transcribed (or manually inputted) in the Xero platform. The expenses can then be approved for reimbursement, or categorised, by the business or their advisor for quick filing.
The new Xero Expenses offers small businesses a more efficient way to manage expense claims with:
Faster expense capture to reduce data entry through automatic scanning of receipts, and eliminates the need to store paper versions.
iOS and Android apps push notifications to let businesses, employees and advisors capture, submit and keep up to date on the status of expense claims from anywhere.
More flexible user permissions to give complete control of who can view, submit, and approve or pay an expense claim for or on behalf of someone else.
Simple and intuitive workflows to make it easy to see where an expense is at, review and approve all unpaid expenses, and create batch payments to get employees paid promptly.
Greater insights and powerful analytics to empower businesses and their advisors with a detailed and real-time understanding of spending habits and patterns.
And with multi-currency, relevant notifications and seamless Xero accounting integration, the new Xero Expenses is smarter, easier to use, and designed to benefit both the small business and their employees.
Here’s a summary of the differences between the classic expense claim functionality and the new Xero Expenses:
Benefits of Xero Expenses
Eliminates hidden costs – reduce data entry and streamline everything from submitting expenses through to reconciling transactions
Better visibility - See all the most important information at a glance so you always know where your expenses and cash flow stand.
Enables growth - Access valuable real-time reporting and powerful analytics to monitor patterns, plan ahead and make fast, informed decisions.
Gain more control - Set company and user-level permissions to give complete control of who can view, submit, and approve or pay an expense claim.
Submit with just a photo - Capture costs as they happen from your mobile phone or tablet and keep everyone up to date with push notifications.
Manage everything in Xero - One login, no double-handling, and real-time tracking help you and your team manage expenses from anywhere.
A more detailed outline of how Xero Expenses works is available in this video:
Xero Expenses is free for all standard and premium subscribers until 28 September 2018. If you are interested in using the new Xero Expenses functionality, get in touch with us and we will activate it on your account and get the initial Xero Expenses setup complete. You can then get your staff to download the app and use the functionality for free until 28 September 2018.
From 28 September 2018, standard and premium plan subscriptions for Xero will increase by $5 plus GST per month (irrespective of whether you use Xero Expenses or not). This increase will provide all standard and premium plan subscribers with one active user for Xero Expenses. Additional active users for Xero Expenses will be charged at the rate of $5 per month. An active user is a user that uses and submits an expense claim during the month.
UPDATE: Xero originally intended to retire classic expense claims functionality on 31 January 2019. However, they have now backtracked on this announcement and have indicated that they will continue to make Classic Expense Claim functionality available into the foreseeable future if you have used the functionality within the last 6 months.