For many companies, staff expenses aren’t a material cost and don’t cause a problem at end-of-year but for others, especially where they have a large number of field service engineers or sales reps, out of pocket expenses are definitely material.
The problem is that in these cases getting things right is really important and, without a good expenses system, this can actually take a lot of time and effort.
In this article, we’re looking at five issues that staff expenses can cause for financial accounting and some solutions that will help.
- Topic:
- Finance
If there’s one subject that is destined to cause confusion in the expenses world it’s mileage claims. With the UK slowly returning to something approaching normality with the lifting of lockdown, now is the right time to make sure you get on top of it with our key tips below.
- Topic:
- Finance
Expense management can be the bane of finance team members’ lives. But there are lots of reasons why expenses need to be well-managed: from saved time to the reduced risk of fraud, staying on top of the many expense claims that come flowing in and out of a finance team has lots of benefits.
As a finance leader, it's important to consider the impact of your expenses process on your team and on your organisation on a regular basis. Failure to do so can lead to creeping problems, from a rising workload for your team and a bloated headcount, to problems with fraud and increased costs.
As seen in our recent UK finance survey, more than one in ten finance professionals still consider expenses to be the most inefficient function of their finance department, highlighting the need for further focus on modernisation.
- Topic:
- Finance
I’m a big believer in there being nothing as valuable as real-life experience and some of the most useful skills I have picked up haven’t been as a result of training, but have been a by-product of being on a project team.
One of the first projects I ever led was implementing an expenses system and I learned lessons that I still use today, many of which apply whatever type of project you are involved in.
- Topic:
- Finance
Are you one of the many HR leaders who is still waiting for the internal investment to upgrade to a modern HR software package? If so, you’re not alone. In this article, we offer a potential solution to turbo-charge your business case and finally get the commitment you need to move forwards.
- Topic:
- Human Resources
If you are in business then there aren’t many weeks that go by without thinking about tax and understanding what you can and can’t claim is usually top of everyone’s list of questions.
In this post, we’re looking at a few of the expenses that are allowable against corporation tax and for directors and employees. Naturally, this isn’t a comprehensive list. Tax statutes run to thousands of pages so with limited space we’ve decided to focus on the most common things that you may come across.
- Topic:
- Finance
There’s no point in producing an exceptional expenses policy if you never tell anyone about it.
If you find that people have broken the rules it is a fair defence for them to say that you never told them what the rules are but on a positive note, having a clearly communicated expenses policy means that people aren’t left out of pocket when they pay for work things out of their own money.
Video is everywhere nowadays and given that it has rapidly become the number 1 form of media used in advertising, we can see that it works. If you have a successful medium it therefore makes sense to utilise it as a tool to deliver your company policies and procedures. You don’t have to deliver the whole policy either as a ‘highlights reel’ of the most important and common aspects of policy will work really well.
- Topic:
- Finance
Internal auditors provide an unbiased and objective analysis of an organisation’s activities and operations. It is not uncommon for large corporations to have a dedicated internal audit team in place, continually keeping an eye on various parts of the business, including employee expenses. However, not all organisations can afford to maintain a whole department. Small and Medium enterprises tend to share some internal auditing tasks amongst managers which, while not a dedicated team, should also ensure includes employee expenses in their audits.
- Topic:
- Finance
At the most basic level, staff expenses is simply about keeping control of costs but when you look deeper into the subject you can find that understanding what people are buying can really help with management. If you can keep control of the money, reduce spending and understand some of the day to day issues that are occurring in your business, then watching your staff expenses spend is certainly a worthwhile job.
- Topic:
- Finance
In a quite remarkable set of accounts, car sales group Lookers recently announced that they have fallen victim to a £327,000 employee expenses fraud. But whilst this sounds like bad news it isn’t the biggest of their problems. In addition to the theft of well over a quarter of a million pounds worth of cash expenses by one employee, the group has had to make restatements and provisions totalling just under £46m.
The group, that boasts 160 branches all over the UK and Ireland is a dealer for brands such as Aston Martin, BMW and Ford.
The question that everyone must be asking is how could it get to this point?
- Topic:
- Finance
