Online Expenses Management

Duty of Care encompasses all the actions that should be taken by employers with regard to employees whilst driving on company business, even in their own cars.

The most efficient way to manage this is to automate the recording and verification of employee details with an automated expenses management solution. This will ensure that you are making all reasonable endeavours for your employees to be safe on the road and keep in line with current legislation.

If duty of care is not properly monitored this exposes the business organisation to significant financial risk, and risk to its reputation, as well as senior directors of the business organisation could also be personally liable if an employee had an accident as a result of work duties, through the introduction of the Corporate Manslaughter Act 2007.

How Expenses(NHS) can help

Expenses(NHS) Duty of Care functionality enables you to:

• Record and upload documentation essential to employees driving whilst on company business
• Perform and monitor checks on vehicles used for business purposes
• Highlight when excessive mileage driven in a day by a single driver

“We introduced the duty of care feature to check the vehicle details for all employees driving their own cars on company business and found 1/3 of them did not have sufficient insurance cover.” Brian Woodhouse, Accountant, Business Link Northwest

Automated email notifications within Expenses(NHS) will remind you when duty of care related documents need to be checked again. Mileage claims can even be stopped until the employee has produced the required documentation, ensuring a timely response to keeping their details and documentation up-to-date. The extensive reporting suite within Expenses(NHS) will allow line managers to see how many of their team are current with their vehicle details and find out when each employee will need to update their required documentation in the coming weeks and months.

Approximately 68% of UK organisations report that more than 10% of their employee expense claims fall outside their corporate T&E policy, highlighting a real need for tighter control over fraudulent employee business expenses.

Software Europe conducted a survey on the expense claim process, which revealed that 4.91% of all travel and entertainment claims are fraudulent. Additional research revealed that 91.5% of those employees who submitted a false claim were never caught by their employer.

Fraudulent activities can soon add up

If 100 employees over claim by 50 miles each week and the policy is 40p a mile - this equates to £100,000 a year being over claimed - expenses provides the opportunity to identify and report which employees are over claiming for a given journey.

Active monitoring of employee spend and enforcing corporate guidelines are fundamental in preventing fraudulent behaviour.

How Expenses(NHS) can help

It will ensure your company policy is visible and provide guidelines and automatic enforcements to reduce over claiming opportunities and encourage employees to be more vigilant when entering and authorising claims.

Every item entered onto the system can be reported on for management analysis and in doing so reveals enlightening spend patterns. Any items that do not comply to the corporate policy are also highlighted during the claiming process for further inspection, naturally reducing fraudulent behaviour.

Expenses(NHS) is a web-based solution, which doesn’t require your employees to download or purchase additional software or hardware. They just need access to a web-browser and the internet or intranet.

Being able to manage the employee expenses reimbursement process online, means that your employees can approve and analyse expenses from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. Expenses(NHS) supports all web browsers including Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape and Safari (for the Mac)

How Expenses(NHS) can improve things for the

Claimant

A claimant is provided with all the information required to submit their expense claim with speed and simplicity. The information stored against an employee determines their privileges within the system and creates their own individual claim policy. For example the Managing Director would claim different items and rates than a sales person.

With Expenses(NHS) there is less information for the claimant to complete, they have access to the company policy online with a summary of their claimable items with spend limits clearly visible.

As a claimant, when you are happy that all your items have been added to your expense claim, all that is required is to click submit and the claim is automatically sent through the approval process chain. This reduces the overall time it takes a claimant to enter an expense claim, and speeds up the time it takes for reimbursement.

What’s more, a claimant can enter their account at any time to track the progress of the claim. Once it has reached final approval a claimant will receive an email to notify them that the expenses claim has been processed for payment.

Line Manager

A line manager will receive email notification of any claims awaiting approval. Using Expenses(NHS) line managers will see

• Highlighted policy exceptions
• Potentially fraudulent claims – e.g. duplicate claims, claims made at the weekend
• Full details of the claim and each item

Line managers will also be able to

Finance / Accounts Department

Once the claim has completed its approval process, the claim is then ready for the Accounts Department to check and pay.

Using Expenses(NHS) will save at least 50% of the time spent by the accounts/finance department, calculating totals & VAT, approving, coding, checking for compliance to corporate and legislative policy, paying expense and keying data into accounts/GL systems.

There is now very little to check and any calculations regarding the total amount for repayment and VAT are automatic; because of improved accuracy there are fewer claims which need to be returned and held up for payment.

Furthermore, claims are by default within company policy and accounts now have more control to introduce a spot checking process of 1/10 claims and spend more time to create effective policies and other business critical tasks.

Additional Senior Management Benefits

Traditionally, senior management personnel are aware of the cost of expenses, but have little control or knowledge of what expenses has been incurred.

Expenses(NHS) provides in-depth reporting options on any and/or all expenditure. Management reports can be scheduled and delivered by email to provide a better understanding of the expenses spend. The reports are designed to provide the information to make effective informed decisions as well as reassurance the HMRC and company policy and duty of care obligations are being adhered to.

Expenses(NHS) will reduce the housekeeping time that comes with the use of any software system. The use of the bi-directional T & A interface facilitates the upload of your employee details and authorisation hierarchy directly from ESR to initially populate your expenses database, thereafter a weekly change file will keep your employee information updated with changes and starters and archiving any leavers.

Inbound interfacing into ESR

Once a claim has been authorised the information populates the ESR payment export file. The payment file grows throughout the month until the payroll cut off point. The file is then exported through our N3 connection using secure FTP to the NHS Hub which then sends a Workflow Notification to ESR. The file is imported in to ESR and filters down to each employee record for reimbursement; this negates the need for manual inputting of the elements and amounts, which without the use of the interface is a resource heavy task for payroll/services organisations alike.

Outbound interface into Expenses(NHS)

The reverse side of the interface will allow employee updates (new surname on marriage or change of address, etc) as well as new starters to be imported from ESR in to Expenses(NHS). A weekly file is imported in to expenses and the administrator receives email notification of new starters/leavers requiring activation/archiving.

Within Expenses(NHS), employees have visibility of the data that is held about them, they are able to prompt the update of ESR, which in turn will update Expenses(NHS). This will ensure the integrity of the data held in ESR is true and gives visibility to employees that previously have not been possible.

Typically, mileage is one area of travel expenditure that is over claimed by employees. With an automated system you can streamline and accurately capture the distances travelled saving your company money in over claimed mileage and save line managers and finance departments time in checking and approving these figures.

How Expenses(NHS) can help

Automatic calculations – claimants enter the start and end location or postcode of where they travelled to, Expenses(NHS) will then return either the shortest or quickest route depending on your policy.

Multiple destinations – employees can enter multiple postcodes and locations throughout the course of their duties taken each day. This then accumulates all the mileage and adds the return mileage to home/office automatically.

Passenger mileage – against each step of the journey the claimant can enter the number of passengers that accompanied them on that specific step.

Saved locations – when a new location is entered into Expenses(NHS), the system retains this information, allowing it to be selected on future claims by simply typing in the lead characters that then returns available locations, relating to those search characters, in a drop down list.

Please note: To retain patient privacy employees can enter the patient number instead of their name.

Recommended mileage– the automatic mileage calculations are just the recommended mileage, if a claimant has a different figure, for example road works caused a diversion, then they can overtype the returned mileage and they then have the opportunity to give a reason for the change in mileage.

Capturing the carbon footprint of your employees when travelling on business can help you monitor, analyse and find ways to reduce your corporate carbon footprint.

Expenses(NHS) is able to capture this information by categorising flights into domestic, short-haul or long-haul journeys. For mileage, vehicles can be grouped by type and engine size, which is already stored against the employee record.

The extensive reporting functionality within Expenses(NHS) facilitates analysis into the carbon output emissions from individuals, departments or the company as a whole and details where the highest level of emissions come from. Through understanding this data you can look at ways to reduce or minimise the impact of these journeys through consolidating business meetings or utilising online resources to conduct meetings.

Other ways to reduce carbon emissions could be to introduce new policies that support environmentally-friendly options available, such as limiting the airlines employees can use to those that offset their passenger’s carbon footprint or use methods of transport with less environmental impact.

In partnership with a steering committee of NHS Trusts, Expenses(NHS) has been enhanced to comply with the NHS Agenda for Change, putting the controls in place to ensure claimants are claiming what they are entitled to in line with the relevant policy, including the flexibility to understand locally agreed rates.

One area specifically is mileage

Home to location mileage – Expenses(NHS) will allow claimants to enter journeys when they have departed from home to a location. The system will know the distance from home to the location and their base to the location and automatically reimburse the lesser of the two.

Lease car mileage - Individual cars can be set as exempt from the ‘Home to Location’ calculation, automatically calculating the correct mileage reimbursement based on the lease car rate.

Excess mileage - If a claimant changes their base of work, as a result of a merger or as an alternative to redundancy, or if required to temporarily carry out duties in addition to their permanent workplace or if the workplace is a temporary workplace, they may reclaim excess mileage as a result of the extra travel incurred. Multiple workplaces can be defined against an employee record; with the dates that are applicable and stating whether the location is for a temporary transfer.

Overtime emergency callout & training mileage - Expenses(NHS) will clearly differentiate between mileage reimbursements for overtime, work arising from on-call duties and training. This will automatically ensure the correct rate of reimbursement is given (based on the element of choice) which may be at a reduced rate to the standard rate, with the added option to disregard the ‘Home to Location’ calculation.

Relocation mileage – Expenses(NHS) provides the option to issue an allowance to monitor the expense incurred during a relocation transition. When an employee claims an expense the amount is deducted from their allowance, giving them visibility to the remaining funds available.

Mileage threshold reduction - Within Expenses(NHS) there is the option to apply different threshold types to the mileage rates reimbursed, where a reduced rate of reimbursement needs to happen upon exceeding a pre-defined number of miles. This can be a threshold on an annual basis or on a per journey basis. In addition, there is an option to apply multiple thresholds consecutively.