Do you work for an organisation where you often need to pay one-off expenses? So far we’ve come across the following people who deal with one-off or irregular expense payments:
- Those who manage clinical trials where you pay medical research participants
- A volunteer manager working for a charity who has to process volunteer expenses
- A market research organiser where you invite people to research activities, and you need to make payment to those participants
- University finance or admin staff who process payments for guest speakers and other individuals that support the University on an ad-hoc basis
If this sounds like you, then you may be interested to hear how we’ve helped many businesses streamline this process.
Why is manually recording one-off payments an issue for businesses?
To give this issue some context, organisations of any type or size can’t pay individuals directly without evidence ie. receipts, invoices or audit trails. This is critical for keeping accounts in order in the event of an audit needing to be taken.
So when an organisation pays an individual they have to keep evidence, such as an expense form and a receipt associated with the relevant transaction. The organisation has to keep hold of this data because all financial transaction data has to be kept for 7 years in the event of an audit.
Given the above, you can imagine how difficult paying a one-off expense can be, especially as most organisations process those payments manually. Going through emails to download receipts or logging all expenses on a spreadsheet and exchanging it over email also jeopardises data protection.
You may think, surely in this day and age, when people have been claiming expenses digitally for decades, this problem has been solved? But it was not until vHelp was born, that the one-off expense problem has been tackled head-on.
Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash
Who can use vHelp services in paying expenses?
Our platform is great for anyone wanting to be paid or pay out expenses for people that aren’t on your pay-roll. For example, a clinical trial participant, volunteer or event guests.
At vHelp we ensure claiming and processing a one-off expense is super easy. We have recently launched a web-based simple expense claiming solution designed for all users claiming expenses. We ask users for a small amount of information needed to process the expense and pay the money into their bank account within 24 hours.
How has vHelp assisted in paying expenses to medical research participants, volunteers and more?
This solution has made things exceptionally easier for both the users and the managers who process expenses, some of the benefits include;
- The volunteer or research participant can make a one-off expense claim in minutes whilst disclosing minimal personal details
- The organisation can review this expense and approve it through our dashboard
- If there is an issue with an expense the manager can reject it, the user will be notified, they can fix the issue and re-submit in minutes
- The expense is paid to the user within 24 hours of approval
- Full audit trail and state of the art reporting is available for the organisation to view and download
The whole process provides a great user experience for both the users and the organisation’s managers. Particularly when there is an issue with an expense. When a manual process is in place, this used to take weeks of emails flying back and forth to get sorted. With vHelp, the claim of a one-off expense and the process of reviewing and amending takes minutes.
If you are processing one-off expenses and feeling frustrated with the amount of admin involved please get in touch with us at hello@vhelp.co.uk.