Receipts/Policies for expenses

 

Receipts, the nightmare for all unorganized people that don’t see the importance of receipts. That was definitely one thing that I had struggled with when working in various places, outside of the finance department people thought we were just bugging them for receipts for no good reason.

Owners and Management weren’t so great at it either so they were not great examples. As a company you need to keep copies for about 3years to support all expenses that you have claimed. In some cases, like when you are a sole owner with no employees, you don’t need any special way of recording your expenses but you definitely want to keep track of everything you do for tax purposes and with that you will need receipts in case IRS decides to audit you.

There are few implementation that I would recommend for any type of business, does not matter if you have 1 employee or a 100 because maybe today you only do have one employee but down the road it might expand. So I will always encourage people to have their ducks in a row while they are small this way when the business expands the rules are set and ready to go rather than setting up rules as you go. Trust me, I have worked for a firm that expanded quickly and policies needed to be made and a lot of employees felt like they are being put in jail when in fact the company were putting in place policies that are common and not harsh at all. Have the policies been made right away no one would even question them.

So here are three things that you may want to consider setting up in your company:

1. Don’t be so keen on giving out the privilege of using a business credit card. Believe me, a person will almost never lose a receipt when they have to pay for the expense out of packet and then request a reimbursement

2. Make policies where an employee will be responsible for an expense if the receipt is lost. Here there can be many policies that go with that, such as, if the expense is over a certain amount or you can be more lenient and give people three tries before making them responsible for the expense

3. Encourage your employees to get an app on their phone so they can snap a picture of the receipt and email it to you end of month. This worked like magic when I told few of my
coworkers that were constant offenders of losing receipts. Within a month there was a great improvement

You need more help learning about making company-wide policies? Let me know, I can help.