All organizations with employees deal with expenses. Not only the expenses to pay the employees' salaries and insurances, but also the expenses of employees made for business purposes. Employees on the road, traveling around, staying in hotels and paying meals. These expense administration and reimbursement is an administration in itself. An administration that need to be worked with carefully, not to frustrate employees, but on the other hand with the required controls to prevent abuse or fraud.
Many companies are processing these expense reports with paper forms, sending expense reports back and forth between managers for respective approvals and further processing. Such an approach has it's drawbacks, like
The workflow enabled expense reimbursement takes a different starting point. Since all forms can be translated into electronic format, and made accessible by the web-browser, the employee doesn't have to fill out paper forms, or templates that (s)he has to look for on shared or public folders. The user worklist directly allows the employee to fill out the expense form electronically, in his browser and to initiate the corresponding approval process. Supporting documents, like invoices, hotel bills or sales slips can be either scanned and automatically attached to the workflow process, or sent physically by (internal) mail service to the financial department. These psychically sent documents are uniquely identified by a workflow generated code, to enable association with the workflow route for archiving purposes.