Instant reimbursements are here.
No more waiting to be paid back!
Being told you’ll be reimbursed for buying something is a bittersweet situation. The act of buying the thing releases dopamine and all the happy feelies that come with and you know you’re going to be paid back for it. Sweet! Here comes the bitter: you now have to wait for that money to come back to you.
Waiting to be compensated for business-related reimbursements takes, on average, 45-60 days. That’s at least 1-2 pay periods from the time you bought the stuff. Your employer basically used your money as a loan and now you have to wait almost a month to get your money back. That’s kinda messed up, isn’t it?
I’m not bad mouthing employers who do this, by the way, it isn’t their fault in the slightest. Believe it or not, reimbursements weren’t always so slow. They actually used to be faster than they are today. Pretty wild to think about – that something was done faster in the past – but it’s true! Years ago, reimbursements were more easily reconciled within the company because everything ran on checks. When’s the last time you used a check to pay for something? Exactly.
Once again we run into the problem of today’s fintech technology leaving certain financial related issues behind. Technology is supposed to innovate, improve and make life simpler. For the most part, it does its job beautifully – our world has automation, AI and many other technological advances that our ancestors could have never even dreamed of. Technology has the ability to make our lives better seamlessly.
Except when no one makes the technology.
In a normal business setting, the reimbursement process goes a little something like this: employee makes a purchase, brings back the receipt(s), another employee from accounting has to analyze the receipt(s) carefully to make sure the purchasing employee did not buy anything for personal use, take a picture of the receipt, load it onto their computer, type in the transaction info in QuickBooks and then…
I mean, I’m not even to the part where you get your money yet. Yeah, it’s that convoluted.
*Takes a deep breath* Still with me? Okay, from there, accounting has to hand it over to payroll and they have to make sure they reconcile it onto a paycheck and that they don’t tax your reimbursed funds. Now you have to wait for payroll to process it and hit your bank which takes, on average, 1-2 pay periods. Phew. It’s a lot of work that goes into reimbursements, so no wonder they take some time, right?
Wrong.
They don’t need to take this long, guys. Reimbursements only take this long because we initially created the cycle in a pre-digital world, technology blurred past us, and we didn’t invent another thing to fix it. Instead, we slapped bandaid solutions on it, handed it off to multiple departments, and called it a day.
If only for brevity’s sake, it’s time for the reimbursement process to change so I can describe it to you in less than 2 dreadfully boring paragraphs. I can hear you all saying now, “Solid Number, you’re our only hope!”
We know.
By using Solid Number, you can reimburse someone in real-time and it will reconcile itself within QuickBooks. It’s logged for you and the person gets their money instantly.
Now, wasn’t that a better explanation of reimbursements rather than those 2 tiresome paragraphs above? The best part: you’re not waiting a month to be paid back!
