Last Update: July 2026
Does your company have a problem with expense reporting?
Maybe you are constantly re-explaining which expenses qualify and how to submit them. Maybe it takes you months before your company repays employees who are owed money. Maybe you’re forced to regularly combat expense reporting fraud. The list goes on and on.
While there are a number of things that can cause problems for your expense reporting program, the good news is that—by making the right changes—you can strengthen your program, easily adhere to policy, and reduce the chances that any headaches occur in the first place.
Here are four lessons you can learn from the way leading Fortune 500s manage expense reporting.
1. Be adaptable
Expense policy ages faster than the people writing it expect. What employees buy changes, and a policy that is not revisited quietly stops describing reality.
Employees sign up for AI assistants, transcription tools, design subscriptions and research services on personal cards, then expense them, and finance discovers the commitment only when the receipt arrives. A policy written for taxis and hotels has nothing to say about a recurring subscription that renews automatically and never passes through procurement.
Adaptable expense policy means revisiting what employees are actually buying, not just what they were buying when the policy was written.
2. Be on the lookout for fraud
You might think that you can trust all your employees to abide by your expense reporting policies and only submit receipts that are for company-approved purchases and travel expenses. Unfortunately, that’s probably not the wisest approach.
The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners puts the cost of occupational fraud at around 5 percent of revenue every year. Its Occupational Fraud 2026: A Report to the Nations examined 2,402 cases across 143 countries, representing more than $3.4 billion in losses, and found a median loss of $104,000 per case.
The typical scheme runs for 12 months before anyone catches it. Cases caught inside six months carry a median loss of $40,000. Cases that run five years or longer exceed $1.1 million.
Size offers no protection, and if anything works the other way. Smaller organizations recorded the highest median losses of any organization size in the 2026 study, because they are the least likely to have the separation of duties and routine review that catch a padded claim early.
This is not a junior employee problem. In the 2026 study, median losses from schemes run by owners and executives were more than nine times greater than those caused by employees. Seniority buys authority, and authority is what turns a small scheme into an expensive one.
The practical defense is not vigilance, it is structure: approval thresholds, separation of duties, and review that happens before payment rather than after.
3. Use modern systems
Those who have traveled for business for several years know how annoying the traditional expense reporting and reimbursement policy used to be. You’re flying from city to city, hopping out of Ubers and Lyfts, and eating meals with client after client. Being expected to keep track of all those receipts—while taking care of all your work responsibilities—can be quite challenging, to say the least. For this reason, many organizations use reporting systems that enable them to manage reimbursements much more easily. While many organizations already enable their employees to simply use their mobile devices to take pictures to track their expenses this isn't universal, and is one of the simplest ways to lower the stress of expense reporting.
If you’re still relying on an old expense reporting system, your process is inefficient and subject to abuse. It’s that simple.
4. Accelerate payments as much as you can
No matter how fast your expense reimbursement turnaround is now, chance are your employees don't think it's fast enough. When your traveling employees are forced to cover expenses out of pocket, they end up tying up some of their income in business expenses that may be needed to cover their day to day expenses.
Once employees submit expense reports, it is critical that companies do everything they can to make sure those expenses are repaid quickly. Otherwise, employees may find themselves in unfavorable financial situations when they’re simply waiting for the cash their employer owes them.
By repaying your employees quickly, you help build a trusting relationship with your staff. No longer do they have to worry about when they are going to be paid back; they know the money will be in their wallets soon enough. This encourages them to continue to absorb travel expenses out of pocket when they’re on the road the next time. On the flip side, employees might think twice about covering business expenses if they expect it will take a lot of time before they are paid back.
There’s no sense in letting your expense reporting policy become a source of headaches. By creating a clear, adaptable policy that’s fair and by using modern technology to facilitate reimbursements, your company can remove the frustration and fraud from expense reporting—giving you more resources to continue growing your operations.
