Expenses – even honest ones – are costing the small business market a lot of money, says a survey from expense management company Concur. OK, you can spot the vested interest from some distance and they’re not trying to hide it, but it seems the average small business is spending 13 days a year on processing and issuing expense claims.
The costs don’t stop when someone puts the claim form in, either electronically or otherwise. The 400 respondents confirmed they spent an average of 13 business days a year just handling the paperwork. Worse, 62% of the companies in the survey said they spent less time chasing new business than they did on working through expenses.
These figures are perhaps the surprising ones. Less so is the fact that just over 78% of the businesses who responded were concerned about how high the claims actually were, with one in four employers (give or take) unsure that the claims involved were genuine.
Concur is of course keen to stress that although only just under four in ten companies use automated expense management software it’s very beneficial to running a company.
A more immediate concern for many businesses will be the trust issue. This is of course a managerial rather than technical thing, and the easy answer is to employ grown-ups. The number of surveys that drift across the average journalist and blogger’s desk with surveys that basically say someone has employed people they don’t trust is staggering and you have to end up asking: why?
Expense fraud is actually nothing more than theft. Its image has gone from one of those slightly laddish things that a lot of people did in the eighties (funny how we journalists, a profession notorious for the long lunch, perpetuated the idea that it was harmless for so long) to something utterly reprehensible in the more recent past when our MPs appeared to be playing the system.
“Playing the system” is an important concept, because there has to be a system in place for employees to behave reasonably. There will be clear examples of abuses and equally clear occasions when someone is taking liberties, but there will also be the grey areas and these are where people need managing.
They also need an understanding of how actions contrary to a policy will rebound on them – but above all they need to be the right people in the first place, so that an employer actually feels he or she can trust them without checking up every five minutes. One in four employers in this survey said they didn’t know whether a claim was legitimate or not; “Why not” might have been a good followup question.
Guy Clapperton
