Most businesses and organisations deal with people who support them but are not officially employees, hence they are not on their regular payroll. We’re talking about the keynote speakers, the market research participants, the volunteers and so on. Organisations often need to make payments to these individuals who help and support them on an ad-hoc basis.
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Saves Time Spent Processing Expenses
Often, the number of people you are reimbursing who are not on your payroll is small. No matter how infrequent these payments may be, our research shows that organisations still spend at least 30 minutes to process a single expense and that is a smooth transaction which encounters no issues.
First, you have to go through the expense form and ensure it’s been filled correctly, which can be a task within itself. Then typically, a business will have a spreadsheet containing previously used bank details which will need to be cross referenced in order to make this payment. Here at vHelp, we recommend against this method of storing confidential information, as it’s not secure and can put your volunteers’ details at risk. Next, you would have to log into your online banking and process the payment or send it to finance or your accountant in order to get the money over to them. Now, I am sure we can all agree that this is not an ideal scenario!
This is an example of a smooth transaction, which we are sure you know, is not always the case when it comes to paying a contact. If there is any incorrect or missing information, you will have to draft an email, go back to the user who submitted this claim, reconfirm the information given and then start all over again.
If this long winded process sounds familiar, then this is where vHelp comes in. vHelp can help reduce the time spent on processing expenses by 88%! How do we do that?
- The expense form is submitted online
- Managers review expenses and approve it on vHelp.
- At the end of that day we charge the organisation and reimburse all users
- If a manager is not happy with an expense, they can reject it and send back a note to the user with feedback ie. “Please submit a legible receipt” - this takes seconds. The user receives the feedback through an email or in-app notification, corrects the expense and sends it back. This whole process takes minutes rather than days.
Obviously, time is money - if you don’t know how much it costs your team to process an expense then please use our calculator to establish how much each expense processing is costing your organisation. If you have multiple layers of approvals, this can become an extremely costly and time consuming process.
It’s vHelps’ guarantee that we will reduce the time taken to process an expense to less than 3 minutes.
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Reimburse An Expense Within 24 Hours
Our research found that most organisations take between 6-8 weeks to pay expenses for those who are not on their payroll. This is a long time to wait, particularly for someone who has low income. In the case of volunteers, they give their time and skills to their charity and of course, that has substantial monetary value. Within volunteer management, it’s best practice not to leave your volunteers out of pocket for their activities for an elongated period of time.
When organisations use vHelp, it ensures that all their users get reimbursed within 24 hours of their expenses being approved.
This is a very important point if your organisation is keen on involving people from diverse backgrounds. It also improves user experience and engagement of those supporting you.
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Reporting and Storing Data Securely
Last year, the vHelp team surveyed 60 charities of various sizes and found that 100% of those charities paid expenses manually! Some organisations managed expenses using paper forms and petty cash boxes whilst others had electronic forms and spreadsheets shared via email in which they then processed reimbursements individually, via bank transfers. This could mean higher risk of sharing and storing personal data inappropriately. A manual process also means reporting and auditing is challenging.
We thought it was time to reinvent this system to not only benefit the organisations and businesses but also, the volunteers and ad hoc individuals who support them. vHelp provides a state of the art dashboard for organisations, allowing them to see all historic expenses claimed, filter and download CSV files against specific data points. The vHelp system is also secure - we utilise cyber security best practice on our software development, get tested by independent security consultants and only work with reputable third party suppliers; we are also fully GDPR compliant.
If you want to save time and money, reimburse your users quickly using a secure system with amazing reporting tools please get in touch with us on hello@vhelp.co.uk.