A full tank of gas, lunch or equipment that we need urgently… Tickets and invoices often pile up in a corner of the wallet in order to be protected from the hazards of loss and forgetfulness which can costly. Among executives, 80% say they regularly submit expense reports and 52% even spend more than 100 euros per month on advances for professional expenses, according to a study published this Tuesday, September 26 by Ifop and Mooncard among a sample of 1,002 executives working in structures of ten or more employees in May 2023.
These expenses are increasing compared to last year. Of the executives who produce expense reports, 32% have already been in financial difficulty because of them, a quarter of the total respondents to the questionnaire, and 1 in 6 have even already been overbanked because of these advances, i.e. 17% compared to 14% in 2022. According to employees, the professional expenses which have increased the most due to inflation are gasoline and catering. Events specific to the life of the company come in 5th place, up very sharply, +13 points compared to last year. According to the study, this should undoubtedly be seen as an attempt to recreate moments of socialization to bring employees back to the office, in reaction to the generalization of teleworking.
The organization may extend the reimbursement period
The difficulties are more noticeable in certain structures, when the organization extends the reimbursement period. The civil service seems to be doing badly on this point since the average satisfaction rate of its executives is 65%. But they are not the only ones. 75% of VSE executives have to wait more than two weeks to be reimbursed.
As a result, 34% of executives say they are “fearful of not being reimbursed” and up to 42% for civil service executives. The loss of paper receipts is a real worry for a majority of executives, almost 60% of them are worried about it. For this reason and to save time, 78% of executives say they incur expenses that should be covered directly by the company.
With the rise in prices, the majority of executives logically limit their expenses on expense reports so as not to put themselves in difficulty on a personal level, but also on explicit instructions from their company which seeks to limit their expenses. However, this does not prevent the number of executives declaring having passed personal expenses into expense reports from increasing sharply in one year: they went from 13% to 23%.