Expense Reports: The Time Thief

Expense reports suck. Nobody wants to do them. Nobody. Unfortunately, for the modern business owner, they’re a necessary evil. But what is it exactly that makes expense reports so completely awful?

The answer is simple: they take forever to finish. And by the time you wrap up this month’s report, it’s already time to start next month’s. And on and on the cycle goes.

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Why Do Expense Reports Take So Much Time?

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Filing an expense report sounds like it should be a fairly straightforward task, right? Unfortunately, there are several steps in the process that eat up time. Here are five reasons why it can feel like expense reports take forever:

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1. The Hunt for Receipts

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Receipts are small, easy to lose, and often the first thing to disappear after a trip or purchase. Whether they’re physical slips or buried in your email, collecting them all in one place is a hassle.

Without receipts, finance teams can’t verify expenses, employees risk delayed reimbursements, and the company is more likely to face tax audits.

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2. Manual Data Entry

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Even after gathering all the receipts, there's still the task of entering every detail—dates, amounts, vendor names, expense categories, descriptions, and more.

For employees, this can take hours. For finance teams reviewing them? Even longer. Manual entry also introduces errors, which add extra time and headaches. A simple typo or misclassified expense can set off a chain of corrections and re-submissions.

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3. Matching Transactions to Receipts

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Reconciling every transaction with a receipt is like playing a game of financial memory. Employees have to match each item on their credit card or bank statement to the right receipt—often without any system help.

If there’s a missing document or mismatched total, it can stall the entire report and create a lot of back-and-forth between the employee, their manager, and the finance team.

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4. Navigating Company Policies

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Most companies have an expense policy—but let’s be honest, how many employees actually read the whole thing? And even if they do, applying it in real life isn’t always straightforward.

Is that Uber ride reimbursable? What’s the per diem limit for dinner in another city? These uncertainties force employees to double-check policies (or guess), which leads to revisions and delays in approval.

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5. The Dreaded Approval Delay

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Once an expense report is finally submitted, it often lands in a queue—waiting for a manager’s review and finance team sign-off. If either party is busy, delays can stretch for days or even weeks.

For employees, that’s frustrating. For finance teams, it clutters monthly closing and makes real-time budget tracking impossible.

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It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

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What if filing your monthly expense report took less than 30 minutes? Or what if you didn’t need to file them at all? (A finance manager just fainted somewhere.)

Outpave understands that business owners and finance teams have better things to do than chase down receipts, manually reconcile expenses, and file reports. That’s why we developed a sophisticated expense management platform that drastically reduces the time needed to file expense reports—or, depending on how your dashboard is set up, eliminates them altogether.

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What Makes Outpave Special

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Outpave automates every step of the expense report process, so they take almost no time at all. Employees can submit receipts and allocate expenses right in the app—within minutes of making a purchase. Business owners can assign spending controls to corporate cards, eliminating the need for manual approvals. Reports can be exported and downloaded with just a few clicks.

Now you can focus on the things that matter most for your company and stop wasting time and energy filing the same report every single month.

Get Started Today

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So what are you waiting for? Sign up for your free software demo today. Don’t forget to follow our social media pages for more tips on how Outpave can improve your small business finances.