Take the stress out of expense management
This week we are acknowledging World Wellbeing Week 2020 - which runs from Monday 22 to Friday 26 June 2020.
Participants including wellbeing practitioners, charities and social enterprises come together over this period to promote the overall awareness of wellbeing from the physical sense, to mental and emotional.
A timely event, as many of us are either experiencing or witnessing the impacts COVID-19 is having on our mental wellbeing in the workplace.
Wellbeing Week – the perfect opportunity to implement changes to support your employees
If you are a business, World Wellbeing Week presents the perfect opportunity to reflect on the overall wellbeing of your employees, particularly during lockdown.
Some organisations are making employee wellness a priority for long term success. Benefits of employee wellbeing can lead to increased productivity, better employee relations and an improved reputation for the company as a whole. A satisfied and fulfilled workforce can also result in reduced absenteeism and improved staff retention.
Stress, which can be caused by long hours and lack of good resources for example, is one of the biggest reasons for absenteeism in the UK, accounting for more than half of all days lost to ill health.
According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), “15.4 million working days were lost in 2017/18 as a result of work-related stress, depression or anxiety, equating to 57.3 per cent of the 26.8 million workdays lost to ill health”.
So, in order for your employees to be healthy and happy, you need to take a look at their wellbeing.
But have you got the slightest idea where to start?
Effective employee wellbeing is about creating a supportive environment where employees feel safe and valued. It’s also about emphasising a good work/life balance while helping employees to stay healthy and active.
So, what if they can free up time, by reducing their workload and ultimately help them to meet their targets and make more money for the company?
This is where our cloud software solution can make all the difference this Wellbeing Week.
An expense management software to improve wellbeing
Efficient business and management software that can reduce the time taken to complete tasks, which are more intuitive to use and create a smoother, more straightforward process will generally help in reducing workplace stress.
The benefits can be felt not just by the administrators and managers of this software, but also the users save precious time to be more productive and focus on the job they are paid for.
Let’s see how Zetadocs Expenses can play its part in this.
Automated expenses can improve wellbeing by saving time
We have spoken previously about why expense inefficiency matters.
One of the reasons we pinpointed was that expenses inefficiency wastes time. Research by Conserve Energy Future revealed that:
- In 2018, UK businesses together wasted over 1,000,000 hours a week searching for mislaid or misplaced paper documents
- The cost of this wasted time amounted to an estimated £20 million.
In the context of expenses, paper expense claims can go astray, sit on managers’ desks for long periods of time, be lost in the mail if sent from a home office or (in some extreme cases) never be submitted because employees don’t feel it’s worth the effort.
On the other hand, Zetadocs Expenses saves time – and thereby improving general wellbeing - because expense claims can be submitted quickly and instantly in real-time by the employee without the use of any paper.
As a solution created for the cloud, it is a collaborative tool that saves time across all expense processes for all teams and departments.
Automated expenses can improve morale
A happy workforce is a productive one, and as described above, manual expense processes can be slow and cumbersome thus having a demoralising impact on employees.
This happens in two major ways:
- Where employees use their own funds to cover expenses, and because the expense system is so complex or manually awkward to use, they simply can’t be bothered to complete the claim. They therefore feel they are ‘subsidising’ their employer and can become embittered towards the company.
- Where employees use their own funds to cover expenses, but when completing and submitting expense claims manually the process takes weeks or months to culminate in a payment back to the employee. Again, this can result in negative feelings towards their work and employer.
In each case, the issue can be solved by an automated expense process like Zetadocs Expenses, which is not only easier to use for the employee, but also because managers administrators can quickly and easily review and expenses claim and trigger a timely repayment to the employee.
Automated expenses can improve wellbeing for managers by improving financial transparency, reporting and decision making.
Financial or departmental managers who are required to generate accurate reporting about costs across their department or the wider business can feel demoralised and stressed if their reporting systems don’t provide the ease of access or insights they need.
Automated expense reporting as offered by Zetadocs Expenses can show at a moment’s notice:
- Costs by category of expense and a comparison of which categories rank highest
- Which departments and individuals incur what levels of expense costs
- Mileage costs across departments and the company, and which individuals account for them
In turn, financial managers can feel more empowered and able to contribute to business decision making because of the intelligence that can be gained from reports.
The GIF below showcases some of this reporting functionality:
Next steps
If you are looking for a super-efficient expense management system that’s designed for the cloud and has the potential to improve wellbeing across your business, check out Zetadocs Expenses. Or contact Equisys today to start your journey to improved expense efficiency.