Do You Track Your Employees Expenses? - written by Cash Miller

So what exactly is employee expense management? Well simply put it is whatever system that you use to record, process, and pay the expenses of an employee during a set period of time. You would also use this system to audit an employee so that if unauthorized expenses were to occur they can be dealt with. It is an unfortunate situation when someone takes advantage of the trust that you put in them by abusing the tools that you have given them to help them better perform their jobs. But it does happen and and more often than you think.

Now depending on how big your business is you may not need to track expenses with an expensive software program. If it's only a couple of employees then your accountant can handle quick monthly reviews. Or you can do it yourself. But you should have something that you can use to keep track of their expenditures on a monthly basis. Based on your past experience with them and others you should have some idea of how much is regularly spent.

One area often abused is cell phones. Almost everyone has a cell phone nowadays. So you as the business owner purchase an appropriate plan for your employee to use the phone during business hours. Yes sometimes they will need to take business calls at odd hours. But after a couple of months they should have some kind of track record. When you see that phone bill are you checking their used minutes? Do they make a lot of long distance calls when there should be none? Are they regularly exceeding their minutes regularly? If they are you should try to give them a chance to explain but after that then something could be up.

If you have some sales representatives that are constantly on the road do you issue them gas cards? If you can be sure that they use them only for work? Often you can tell based on when they are used. Do you see some large weekend expenses? Maybe they used it to take a trip? These are the kinds of things that you need to be on the lookout for. Because it can happen even if you don't want to believe it.

Whatever kind of credit that you think they need access to you had better double check it regularly if you want to prevent abuse. That is why you need a regular reporting system. Besides the fact that if they do have an out of pocket expense they would probably like to be reimbursed for it. They need to keep all sales receipts so that they can be turned in. If your employees know you are tracking everything then they will be less likely to try something they shouldn't. And that can save both you and your employees from a difficult situation that you don't want.