Expense reports are a nuisance for everyone involved: Employees hate filing them and finance teams, who are often stuck with the unenviable task of chasing down employees to turn in their receipts, hate processing them. In short, expense reports can be a drain on both time and money.

The salesperson who purchased a new headset? Finance needs their receipt. The manager who needed a new laptop and dongle? Finance also needs their receipt. Office managers and executive administrators who routinely purchase supplies? You guessed it—finance needs their receipts.

Even with digital receipts, you could run into issues come tax time if they’re not itemized or if your employee made a purchase with their personal credit card and not a company card.

Thankfully, the latest advances in finance automation make expense reporting easier across the board.

How to automate expense reporting

Here are 5 ways that automation can lessen the burden of expense reporting:

1. Virtual cards

Instead of employees having to use their own credit cards and getting reimbursed later, virtual cards allow employees to make purchases online on anything from software subscriptions to office equipment. Virtual cards can be created in seconds and help to eliminate manual data entry and reconciliation. They’re also less prone to fraud since they can’t be physically stolen, don’t store personal information, and are easy to cancel.

2. Receipt matching

When AI-technology is applied to expense management, expense reporting becomes much simpler. For example, AI-powered receipt matching can automatically collect, verify, and reconcile the majority of receipts to automate employee expense reports. And in some instances, the moment an employee spends, they can instantaneously submit receipts via text or email.

3. Merchant and category rules

When finance teams have to manually code and process transactions, it can really slow things down. Merchant and category rules remove that unnecessary step, allowing users to easily import documents and create mapping rules for any accounting field, like merchant or department. From there, transactions can be categorized and synced to your general ledger.

4. Accounting software integrations

Accounting software integrations can help make for a frictionless expense reporting process. Features like universal CSV upload provides flexibility that can help you close your books faster and more efficiently to ensure an easier closing process.

These integrations are especially helpful come tax time. Because the IRS requires purchases of more than $75 to have a receipt when the nature of the expense is unclear, this functionality can help streamline your tax filing process.

5. Real-time spend visibility

Want to get a glimpse of every transaction as soon as it happens? You’ll want a platform equipped with real-time reporting to help you make faster financial decisions.

AI-powered savings insights can automatically help you pinpoint ways to save your company money in the future by uncovering duplicate subscriptions, increases in spend, and unused partner rewards.

The Ramp and Amazon Business advantage

Expense reporting is a breeze thanks to the new Ramp and Amazon Business integration. Both Ramp and Amazon Business are designed to help save customers time and money, thanks to built-in spend controls. And with Ramp’s Amazon Business receipt-matching integration, Ramp will scan all of your transactions and automatically generate receipts for any purchase you make. Shopping for the business items you need has never been easier.

Ramp offers advanced virtual cards, merchant and category rules, accounting automation, and more for Amazon Business users. Ramp also allows you to monitor all of your expenses in a single, streamlined dashboard. With direct integrations for accounting software like QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, and NetSuite, you can close your books 5 days faster when you use Ramp. Not to mention, it’s free.