FREE 10+ Consultant Expense Report Samples in PDF | MS Word

While it is true that as a business leader, you should lead your team, you may not be able to attend each activity that occurs within your company. You will have to attend business meetings to different places, and if you are around, you can be busy doing more important things, such as updating the business strategy. Other times, you may have to focus on the business area that needs more attention. To ensure that someone can watch over the areas of your business that you can not attend, you have to hire a sub-leader. In doing so, there will be necessary expenses on your behalf to keep your business running. With that said, can you trust your sub-leaders with the expenses that they are making while you are not around? Let’s say you trust them that much that they won’t abuse the power you have vested them. Are you a hundred percent sure that they will not make mistakes and that what they think is best for your company is also what you think is good for your business? You can’t be so sure? Then, you will have to do expense tracking. To do that, you will have to obtain a consultant expense report.

What is a Consultant Expense Report?

A consultant expense report is a document that the qualified employees fill out with the list of expenses that they spend from their pocket to execute the operations of a consultant business. These expenses may include monthly bills for utilities, team building expenses, etc. Periodically, you will have to create a reimbursement for these expenses and add these items as part of business expenses. For proper expense management, you can also implement an expense reimbursement policy for your consultant business. Most employers require their employees to provide expense receipts for validation, especially for expensive bills and the expenses that due to a shortage of company budget.

Aside from the reimbursement, you can also use consultant reports for your employees to spend on personal expenses. In these cases, you will deduct these expenses on their next payroll. For a more seamless process, you can also check our article about sample expense forms.

Components of a Consultant Expenses Report

Before you go over the consultant expense report samples and templates that we have prepared, it would help if you know what to look for in choosing the right consultant expense report. The contents of a consultant expense may vary to the policy that you are implementing in your business. However, in general, it should include the item’s date of purchase, amount, and its seller. You should also see the reason for purchase and which project or client the employee purchased the item for. You can also require your employees to include specific notes. Other employers also include the reimbursement policy in the document for the employees to use as a reference. Lastly, it should have the author or the employee who purchased the item.

10+ Consultant Expense Report Samples in PDF | DOC

Now that you know what to expect from a consultant expense report take a look at the following examples. You can use these zipped documents as a reference to create a customized consultant expense report template, which everyone in the company can use uniformly.

1. Consultant Expense Report Sample

2. Consultant Travel Expense Report Template

3. Consultant Expense Report Template

4. Consultant Expense Report Example

5. Consultant Expense Report in PDF

6. Formal Consultant Expense Report Sample

7. Basic Consultant Expense Report Template

8. General Consultant Expense Report Template

9. Sample Consultant Expense Report Template

 10. Employee Consultant Expense Report Sample

7. Consultant Expense Report in DOC

Best Practices for Consultant Expense Report

Creating and managing a consultant expense report is one of the long internal processes that many people find very hassle. It is true, but it does not mean that there is nothing we can do to mitigate this issue. Follow the steps below to ensure that you and your team can finish the entire process of the expense reporting seamlessly.

1. Do Automation

There are many technologies available in the market that can allow you to automate some internal operations of your consultant business for a faster and more accurate process. It includes the expense report system. Through automation, you can easily detect duplicate and suspicious expense claims. Aside from that, you can easily access these records, making the audit process more manageable.

2. Create a Clear Policy

Automation can be useless if your policy itself is faulty. Update your relevant company policy and make sure that it has complete details. If you don’t have a fixed procedure for the expenses, you should develop one. Address all the possible relevant issues and make the necessary changes to create a more precise policy, which will complement the automation process.

3. Have Your Employees Adhere to Deadlines

With an automated process, the employees can easily forward receipts through emails or upload them to a particular application. Thus, there is no reason for them to make the submissions late. As a business leader, it is your job to let your people understand the importance of submitting the receipts on time. It will avoid delayed reimbursements. Additionally, by insisting on the deadlines, you can create more accurate business calculations, such as the monthly consultant budget. We recommend you to include these deadlines in your company policy and set clear consequences if they don’t submit it on time.

4. You Must Be Accountable

Speaking of reimbursement, as a business leader, you should also make sure that you process the compensation for the expenses on time. It will avoid any unnecessary disputes, which can also create relationship problems between you and the employees.

In this article, we have covered another essential tool for a consultant business. By now, you should have an idea of how to create an expense report. However, there are skills in managing a consultant expense reporting that you can only acquire after a long-term experience, just like business management. Therefore, to fully master these skills, you need to start doing it. However, it does not mean that you cannot gain essential information about running the business that you are in. You can start by reading our article about consultant marketing plans, which is also one of the crucial business areas that you have to look into.