How much do people hate doing expense reports? See for yourself.
May 21st, 2008 kmr2We came across a very interesting tool the other day that provides some insight into how employees think about expense reports.
There’s a simple tool out there called Tweetscan that let’s you search public comments on Twitter. On a lark, I typed in “expense reports” and saw a long list of complaints from regular people. I just did so again this morning and received an even longer list. What’s amazing is the consistency in language - lots of uses of words like “hate”, “dread” and “ugh.” Try it yourself and see: http://www.tweetscan.com/index.php?s=expense+reports
Two things about these tweets (lingo for posts on Twitter) were of particular interest to us:
1. The vast majority of expense reporting solutions in the market are designed to make company controllers and senior management happy by solving for things like cost controls and policy enforcement. Actual ease of use for the employees is a complete afterthought - hence the dread of using software like this.
2. When I ran these searches on Twitter, they were during normal business hours. This means company employees, during the hours they are getting paid, are doing their expense reports. That means that the longer it takes them, the more frustrated they become, the more money it costs the company. Wouldn’t it save a ton of money to make the expense reimbursement process simpler? We sure think so. Maybe they could convince their companies to try some easy to use expense reporting software 