For many teams, coming back from a work trip involves locating crumpled receipts for coffees, looking for booking confirmations, and retyping expenses into spreadsheets and forms. This is shadow work: the work behind the work that pulls your team away from important and enjoyable tasks. Perk’s own Cost of Shadow Work Report found that employees lose seven hours per week to avoidable tasks like these.
To reclaim some of this time, this guide breaks down how mobile receipts can significantly cut down the amount of time travelers spend on filing expenses, and how automations can speed up the reimbursement cycle for travel managers and finance teams.
Methods for travel and expense management
Travel and expense management refers to the process of booking travel for work, as well as keeping track of other costs associated with that business trip.
Most travel booking costs are arranged ahead of time by travel managers, such as finding and booking accommodation and arranging transport and insurance. Other costs occur during the trip, and need to be logged and reported by the employee, and consequently handled by travel and finance teams to ensure they comply with company travel policy and overall legal compliance.
The processes of travel booking and expense management are often considered separate, but with modern management platforms like Perk, these are consolidated into a single solution.
Traditional travel expense management
Traditionally, managing expenses for work travel involves a lot of paperwork: receipts, expense reports, proof of travel such as boarding passes, and travel logs. In a desktop-based process, employees must keep track of physical receipts and invoices until they return to the office, reconciling, scanning and submitting resulting reports to the relevant team members.
Travel managers and finance teams must then process these documents by manually entering data into a tracking system, and compare the information against the company’s travel policy and allowances.
Modern mobile travel expense management
Modern expense management is no longer tied to a desktop, but can be done anywhere on the go on a mobile phone. Employees can snap a picture of their receipts in real-time, with apps being able to scan, digitize and extract data automatically.
This means no more lost receipts, or time-consuming end-of-month reports. Purpose-built software designed for travel allows costs associated with each trip to be submitted in real-time, making it easier for finance teams to keep track of allowances. This is equally important whether you’re a small business or an enterprise organization, reducing the risk of errors and overspend.
How does mobile expense management speed up your reimbursement cycle?
Mobile expense management can significantly reduce time spent on shadow work during the reimbursement cycle, through automation and integration with existing finance systems.
Automation examples
Scanning mobile receipts and extracting relevant information, categorizing expenses without the need for manual entry.
Automatic VAT reporting for reclaims, with the ability to recognize multiple VAT rates from one photo.
Matching receipts to card transactions.
Automated policy management, reviewing reports against pre-defined company travel policies, highlighting anomalies so you only review what's necessary.
Consolidating all expenses into one report for the entire trip.
Integrations
One of the major advantages of mobile expense management comes through integration with your existing systems, such as accounting software and ERP.
This allows you to create a single source of truth, giving finance teams total visibility without the need to jump between multiple systems.
As soon as a receipt has been captured, the information can be directly applied, updating the record and allowing for real-time reporting. Integration not only improves visibility but also reduces the points at which errors can be made.
Key features
The right mobile expense solution should do more than track receipts; it should be an intelligent assistant for both travelers and the finance team. When choosing your mobile expense software, look out for the following features:
Ability to capture mobile receipts in-app
OCR (Optical Character Recognition): scan, digitize, and extract data (merchant, date, amount) from receipts.
Ability to handle split receipts when personal and business expenses occur on the same bill.
Policy automation that flags out-of-policy spending in real-time
Real-time syncing and reporting
Customizable approval workflows
Integrations such as Xero, QuickBooks, or NetSuite
Mobile receipts - powerful for companies, effortless for employees
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Why U.S. businesses choose Perk to speed up their reimbursement cycle
mci group cut expense processing time by 80%
mci group is a world-leading provider of live and digital communication, planning and executing a high volume of events and conferences. With frequent business trips lasting up to three weeks, employees used to keep track of every receipt and manually enter expenses into Excel. Managing 160 cardholders and 18,000 transactions annually quickly became overwhelming for the finance team.mci has now fully digitized its expense management with Perk. Employees use their UBS credit cards for business travel, while Perk’s AI automatically extracts amounts, VAT, and key financial data.The finance department’s productivity has increased by an impressive 500% on credit card management, and expense processing time by operations has been reduced by 80%.Perk’s intelligent expense management platform takes the shadow work out of expenses, invoices, and cards:
Receipts that file themselves: Perk’s AI captures the data, extracts the VAT, matches it to the right transaction, and routes expenses for approval.
Automated policy checks: allocated reviewers, automated approvals, and preset policies.
Powerful insights dashboard on-the-go: including cost breakdowns per traveller and automated trip overviews.
For those looking to bypass the reimbursement cycle entirely, Perk Card allows travellers to use a company card, with built-in policy control and automated reconciliation with spend reporting.
For features beyond the receipts, such as Perk’s integrated online booking tool and 24/7 travel support, see our Travel Platform solution.
Written by
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Growth Marketing Director
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