One of the habitually late expenses to come in for a month can be expense reports. Let’s face it they’re not a lot of fun for people. It’s like pulling teeth.

But what if there is a way to make it easier for people?

I think one way can be is to make the form electronic and give people the ability to submit it by email. I’ve designed Excel spreadsheets to serve this purpose.

Take a look at your current expense report form. It probably could work in there too. You have dates going across and types of expenses going down (or perhaps, flipped the other way). This will fit nicely into rows and columns on an Excel sheet.

Imagine if this can be emailed in. It would be nice for the computation of it too, being a handy softcopy form that somebody could have on their laptop while traveling. They could fill in part of the trip and not have to wait until the end to complete the whole thing. Plus, the system would do the calculation and save them that trouble.

What about the receipts? Well, perhaps, they could be mailed in separately to be matched up, but at least you get the numbers in sooner so you know what the expenses would run during the month or other time period. Now, if their people happen to have printers that can scan, all the better. They could scan the receipts in. Another beauty with the soft copy is that then you can have them together in Excel and do the compilation of the expense reports. Plus, it’s less paper to have stored around.

So if expense reports are habitually late in your company, consider going electronic. Put it into Excel and make it easy for your people to comply and get them done.