Benefits of Digital Employee Claims

In most organizations, employee claims is a reality, irrespective of the size of the organization. In most companies employees have to submit claims primarily for some income tax purpose like medical reimbursement, Rent receipts or for internal claims purposes like travel or mobile reimbursement. Depending on the number of employees the volume of these transactions can be from a few hundred per month to a few thousand per month.

While companies routinely look to digitize their time & attendance records, employee claims is one of the biggest transactional processes that HR and Finance need to manage together and is often not prioritized for digitization.

Let’s look at some of the benefits that you get by digitizing the employee claims process:

1. Checklists – You can easily deploy checklists in the digitized process to ensure that what is important from statutory, audit and internal process point of view is known to the employee upfront. The digitized process can ensure that unless certain mandatory fields or information is completed, the claim won’t be processed further thus ensuring accuracy of claims submitted
2. Approval & Audit Trails – A digitized process can easily help you identify the bottlenecks in terms of approval process. It also helps maintain a clear audit trail which helps in internal and external audits. Since employee claims are financial transactions such audit trails are very helpful.
3. Process Adherence – In the digitized process, you can ensure that if certain conditions are fulfilled the claim can be auto approved, thus reducing the administrative burden on managers, HR & Finance. This automation ensures that you would need fewer man-hours to process higher volume of claims thus ensuring you get a higher productivity from existing staff.
4. Documents – In most geographically distributed businesses, employee claims means important documents travel from 1 location to another with a risk of being lost in transit. With digital process you can ensure all necessary documents are stored electronically and are searched easily.
5. Access Control – With digitized claims process you can easily control who sees what, thus ensuring that the process follows the intended workflow and there are no surprises. This also ensures that important documents can be shared with 3^rd party vendors or auditors easily and in a secured manner
6. Accounting – Having electronic claims processing gives HR & Finance access to this information in real time. This allows them to look at trends and identify individuals with higher amounts of claims in a particular month or quarter. Such analysis can help HR & Finance ask the right question/s at the right time and take corrective action/s quickly.
7. Confidence – When the process is digitized with necessary checks and balances in place, you know that the information contained is accurate & complete. As compared to a manual process, here the ownership & accountability to submit all information correctly with supporting documents is clearly on the employee. This improves the data accuracy and the organizations ability to take policy decisions based on information contained in the claim files over a period of time.
8. Communication – In a digitized claims process, the employee can check the status of his/her claim thus reducing communication & building transparency in the process. Since he/she knows what important & mandatory right is at the time of submitting the claim, he/she can ensure all necessary & sufficient information is provided up front. The visibility on the approval status helps build confidence in the process & would create a positive employee experience.

Today as more & more companies are considering digital processes, employee claims definitely needs to be prioritized higher up in the order. With a well designed digital claims process all stakeholders, employees, managers & HR & Finance processing units can focus on important aspects of their work. Such a process would free up all these stakeholders from follow-ups, stress caused by missing claim documents or claims and statutory and audit pressures. If you combine these benefits with an intuitive user experience of the system, claim processing can pave the way for digital workplace at your organization.