Sales Team and Employee Expense Reimbursement Submission Deadlines: Industry Practice Discussion
This article discusses corporate expense reimbursement submission deadlines. The author's company currently has a loose policy that prefers weekly submissions but only disallows reimbursement for expenses over 30 days, leading to process inconsistencies. To accelerate month-end closing (currently taking 9 business days), the author proposes mandatory Monday submissions, but the president prefers monthly submissions. The article aims to learn about other companies' practices, submission frequencies, handling of late submissions, and innovative ideas.
I'm curious how other companies require sales teams and employees to submit expense reports. Currently, we tend to submit weekly, but the only policy is that expenses over 30 days old may not be reimbursed. This leads to inconsistent processes—some people submit reports weekly, some about monthly, and others somewhere in between (though quite irregularly). We just finished mapping out the month-end process and identified "pain points" to speed up month-end closing (currently it takes about 9 business days to complete the full monthly financial package). One pain point pointed out is that we either hold accounts payable (AP) for these reports or miss them before closing. I proposed an idea to the president: maybe we should require expense reports to be completed by the end of Monday (we're also gradually rolling out Expensify, so it might be a good time to set a policy). To my surprise, he was hesitant and said he'd prefer everyone submit monthly. However, this would create a heavier workload for AP at month-end, and those who currently submit weekly wouldn't like it. So, I'm curious how others handle it: how often are reports due? When are they due? How do you handle chronically late expense reports? Are there any unconventional ideas in this area? We've considered that if employees submit reports late, they'd need to fill out a form to get reimbursed, but that also has downsides—it adds paperwork for us too!