Dated expense report systems are more than the time-consuming and tedious annoyance employees and travel managers know well. A Wakefield Research survey on behalf of human resources provider TriNet revealed the cost of sluggish reimbursements to be far greater—as drastic as employees saying, I quit.
“Archaic expense reporting isn’t just frustrating managers
and annoying employees. It’s lowering morale, hurting productivity and costing
businesses time and money,” stated TriNet Cloud division chief technology
officer Dan Fritcher in a statement.
The survey of 1,000 business travelers 23 and older,
conducted online and via email between May 29 and June 10, found that 73
percent had to wait “a frustrating amount of time” to be reimbursed by their
employers. Respondents waited five weeks on average.
While waiting, 60 percent had trouble paying off the
expenses, and millennials were 21 percent more likely to have trouble. “Millennials
are driving the future of work, yet many companies are still in the dark when
it comes to the basics of expense management,” according to Fritcher.
More than half of respondents, 53 percent, bypassed reimbursements
to avoid filling out expense reports, and a similar number skipped a
professional development event because of their companies' reimbursement
processes.
Ultimately, tiresome reimbursement processes may be be too
much to tolerate. Almost three-quarters, 71 percent, said they’re likely to “eventually
look for another job” if their employers' reimbursements continued to be “constantly
late.”
If their expense management systems were easier to use, 79 percent said they’d be more productive, and 84 percent would “think more highly” of their employers.