Chasing Staff for Receipts: The Payroll Cost of Expense Administration

The month-end message nobody enjoys sending

On the 24th, a message goes out: "Please send your receipts for the month by Friday." By Friday, a third of them have arrived. The finance clerk sends a second message, then a third, then starts walking to desks. Some receipts are photographs taken at an angle on a car seat. Some are bank-statement lines with no slip. Some are missing the reason for the spend, the project it belongs to or the name of the person it was for. A few never arrive at all, and the clerk quietly books the amount as "unallocated" because the payroll run closes on Monday.

Expense administration is a small process that sits in the middle of many people's weeks. It rarely appears on a risk register, but it takes time from employees, managers and finance every single month, and it fails in ways that cost real money.

Why receipt chasing never ends

The cost of submitting is borne by the employee, the benefit by finance. Staff have little reason to prioritise a task that does not help them in the moment.
Information is split across channels. A receipt in a WhatsApp chat, a note in an email, a card transaction on a statement and a spreadsheet of claims all describe the same expense.
The rules are unclear. People do not know what counts as acceptable evidence, what the limit is, or which cost centre applies, so they submit incomplete claims or none.
Chasing is manual. Reminders depend on a person remembering who is outstanding, which is the pattern described in manual routine reminders and repetitive follow-up.
Approval waits on the same people who are slow to submit. Managers approve in batches, often late, which pushes reimbursement and month-end back again.

The wider emotional pattern, in which a few minutes of reminding quietly consume a working week, is captured in the slow leak of time through manual reminders.

What it looks like in practice

finance staff keeping a "who still owes me receipts" list in a spreadsheet;
claims submitted weeks or months after the spend, from memory;
reimbursement queries about the amount, the date or the category;
card transactions with no matching document, discovered at the audit or year-end;
managers approving claims without checking, because there are too many;
employees who stop claiming small expenses because the process is irritating, which hides the true cost of doing business from the books.

How the pain turns into money

Finance payroll. The hours spent chasing, reading unclear photographs, retyping amounts and matching them to statements are paid hours that produce no analysis or insight.
Employee payroll. Each claimant spends time finding receipts, filling in the form and answering queries. Spread across everyone who spends company money, the total is sizeable.
Manager payroll. Approval is a task for more senior and more expensive time.
Close delay. Late expenses push back the month-end close and make management numbers less reliable, a theme explored in manual month-end close.
Lost tax recoveries. Input VAT can generally only be claimed when a valid tax invoice is held. A receipt that never arrives, or a till slip that does not meet requirements, can mean VAT that the business cannot recover. Your bookkeeper or tax adviser will confirm what documents are needed in your situation.
Control gaps. Spend without documentation is harder to challenge, whether it is an honest mistake or something worse.
Transcription errors. Amounts keyed by hand from a crumpled slip are an obvious place for mistakes. The general pattern is described in retyping invoices and manual capture.

South Africa's tax authority is itself moving towards data-driven administration. In August 2026, SARS published a consultation paper on modernising Value-Added Tax, describing a future in which tax "just happens" for most taxpayers by using data and technology. Businesses that already hold clean, timely expense data will find that direction easier to follow than those who gather receipts after the fact.

An illustrative cost model

The figures below are illustrative assumptions for a hypothetical business of 60 employees in Durban, 25 of whom claim expenses or use company cards each month.

Assumption	Value
Finance time spent chasing, matching and capturing	40 hours a month at R220
Employees submitting each month	25
Time each employee spends finding receipts and filling in the form	1.5 hours a month at R300
Manager approval and queries	25 claims × 15 minutes at R450 an hour
Claims a month without a usable tax invoice	15, with an average of R350 VAT not recoverable

Finance: 40 × R220 × 12 = R105,600
Employees: 25 × 1.5 × R300 × 12 = R135,000
Managers: 25 × 0.25 × R450 × 12 = R33,750
Unrecovered VAT: 15 × R350 × 12 = R63,000
Illustrative total: about R337,000 a year

Some of this effort is a legitimate part of control and could not be removed. But the exercise shows that the cost is made up of many small pieces, most of which come from fetching and re-entering information that existed at the moment of purchase.

Why it is tolerated

Expense claims feel too small to fix. The chasing is done by someone who is also doing ten other things, so the hours never show up as a single figure. Employees assume the process is simply how finance works. And because most claims do eventually arrive, the system appears to function, even though the total effort is high.

When it becomes urgent

the business grows past the point where one person can remember who is outstanding;
an audit or tax query asks for documentation that does not exist;
staff travel more and card use rises sharply;
month-end close slips because of a few missing documents;
a senior employee leaves with a large unreconciled advance.

What better looks like

The best fix is to capture the evidence at the moment of spending and to stop depending on people's memory for the rest.

Write a one-page expense rule. What is claimable, what evidence is needed, what the limits are and when the deadline falls.
Capture the receipt on the spot. A phone photograph submitted the same day beats a month-end envelope. Tools exist that read receipts automatically: Microsoft's AI Builder receipt processing model uses optical character recognition to extract key information from receipts, and the Document Intelligence receipt model returns details such as merchant, date, tax and total as structured data.
Route approvals automatically. Power Automate approvals lists approving expense reports as a common use, with approvers notified and able to respond to the request directly.
Automate the chasing. Reminders should be triggered by the system, sent to the claimant, and escalated to the manager after a set number of days.
Require the reason at submission. Project, cost centre and purpose are cheap to supply at the time and expensive to find later.
Close the card loop. Match card transactions to receipts weekly rather than at year-end.

Where the same employees are also being asked for other routine admin, high-value employees doing low-value admin covers the wider payroll effect.

Practical next actions

Record, for one month, how many hours finance spends chasing and capturing.
List the five most common reasons a claim comes back for correction.
Write the one-page expense rule and share it with all staff.
Pilot photo submission with one department.
Set an automatic reminder on day 3 and day 7 after the claim deadline.
Compare the hours spent and the number of missing receipts after two months.

Bottom line

Chasing employees for receipts is a payroll cost, a month-end delay and a small tax risk packed into one routine task. The fix is rarely a large system. A clear rule, receipts captured at the point of spend, automatic reminders and routed approvals remove most of the repeated effort and give finance back time for work that needs judgement.

Sources and further reading

Receipt processing prebuilt AI model - AI Builder (last verified 10 October 2026)
Receipt data extraction - Document Intelligence - Foundry Tools (last verified 10 October 2026)
Get started with Power Automate approvals - Power Automate (last verified 10 October 2026)
Value-Added Tax - South African Revenue Service (last verified 10 October 2026)