Do you remember in early 2000 when every company talks about making office paperless? But this policy put on the self when it comes to employee claim or reimbursement process.
Claim or reimbursement process is considered to be one of the most complex and human-intensive processes of HR and payroll. Earlier many companies felt that employee claims cannot be fully digitized or made paperless because company as well as income tax department expect proofs of actual expense.
This story does not work in today’s world as everybody is having a smartphone equipped with advanced technology in their hand.
So this blog outlines how advanced technology can help in digitizing claims and reimbursement process.
What can organizations hope to achieve by digitizing paper documents through the imaging/capture the bills, electronic forms technologies and by using work-flow and business process management technologies?
1. No more checklists
In many companies, HR software department prepares a checklist for claim related criteria, eligibility and policy. Generally, a checklist is verified manually which makes employee claim settlement process long, complex and tedious.
In the digitized process, you can configure the checklist in the system and route each employee claim process through the system. It ensures all steps are followed, only eligible & valid claims pass through and reach to account or payment department.
2. Store claim receipts or proofs on the cloud
For any employee claim process, the most important document is proof or receipt of expense. Many times it gets misplaced by an employee or by the HR department, due to which claim is not processed in a timely manner.
With the multi-location company having centralized claim processing department, documents travel from one location to other location with a risk of being lost in transit.
But with digitizing claims, employees don’t need to keep any physical proof. An employee can take a snapshot of expense receipts or proofs with their smartphone and save it on the cloud and submit afterward for approval.
3. Process Adherence
There has been set a predefined process to claim the expenses in which the process involves the approval of the seniors of respective departments & there on passed for approval to the HR department. But, sometimes it happens that the predefined workflow for claiming the expenses may not have adhered and it can be by-passed or neglected due to which there would be the delay in checking and approving the claims.
In the digitized process, you can ensure that the process will have adhered as it will not allow to by-pass any process flow. If certain conditions are fulfilled the claim can be auto-approved, thus reducing the administrative burden on managers, HR & Finance. This automation ensures that you would need fewer man-hours to process the higher volume of claims thus ensuring you get a higher productivity from existing staff.
4. Remove Bottlenecks in Approval & Audit Trails
Claim approvals definitely need to be prioritized as delay in it will increase dissatisfaction and reduce the moral of the employees. To process claims, HR managers require to check various criteria as per policy. It happens that claims are not processed timely as HR managers perform a cumbersome job.
A digitized process can easily help you identify the bottlenecks in terms of the approval process. It also helps maintain a clear audit trail which helps in internal and external audits. Since employee claims are financial transactions such audit trails are very helpful.
5. Securely Share Information
In a survey of HR professionals, it has been found that 69% of people share important documents with 3rd parties in an unsecured way. The key is to share information in a secured manner.
With digitizing claims process, you can easily control who sees what, thus ensuring that the process follows the intended workflow and there are no data leakages. This also ensures documents will be shared with the 3rd party in a secured manner.
6. Accounting
Nearly 85% of time and effort is spent on the accounting activity of submitted claims. Manually processing employee claims with their payroll become difficult for HR managers and consume more time than required.
Having electronic and digitizing claims process gives HR & Finance access to this information in real time and will have the claim amounts of employees directly processed with the payroll software. This allows them to look at trends and identify individuals with higher amounts of claims in a particular month or quarter. Such analysis can help HR & Finance ask the right questions at the right time and take corrective actions quickly.
7. Communication
Whether a claim is approved or rejected, there needs to be clarification between employees and HR manager. Employees may not get correct clarification of why their claims have been rejected. Because of this, there will be misunderstanding and employees will feel disinterested.
In a digitized claims process, the employee can check the status of his/her claim thus reducing communication & building transparency in the process. The visibility of the approval status helps build confidence in the process & would create a positive employee experience.