A consultant wraps up a client meeting. She grabs a taxi to the airport, expenses a lunch receipt, and makes a mental note to file everything when she's back at her desk. Two weeks later, she's still hunting for that taxi receipt. Finance is chasing her for details. The project manager needs those costs to close the books. Everyone is frustrated.
This scenario plays out thousands of times across professional services firms.
According to the Global Business Travel Association, completing a single expense report takes 20 minutes on average. Worse, one in five expense reports contains errors, requiring an additional 18 minutes to correct. For a firm processing thousands of expense reports annually, the math is brutal. Companies spend nearly 3,000 hours correcting errors in expense reports each year.
In professional services, where billable hours equal revenue, this inefficiency is not merely a loss of time but also loss of revenue. Every minute spent chasing receipts or correcting expense reports is time not spent delivering client work.
That's why streamlining expense management matters. Not as a back-office improvement, but as a way to improve focus, cost control, and project profitability.
In this article, we explore five practical ways Professional Services firms can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations to simplify expense management. These approaches reduce duplication, automate workflows, and help professional services firms regain control without slowing teams down.
1. Capture Expenses Directly Against Projects
The first step to simplifying expense management is eliminating guesswork.
In many firms, employees submit expenses with minimal context. Finance later figures out which project, which client, and whether the cost is billable. This delay creates errors and weakens cost visibility.
With expense management in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, expenses are recorded directly against projects from the start.
Employees select:
- The project
- The task or phase
- The expense category
- Billable or non-billable status
This creates immediate clarity.
Project managers see real costs as work happens, not weeks later. Finance teams stop retrofitting expenses into project reports. Leadership gains early insight into margins instead of learning after delivery is complete.
This alone removes a large portion of manual reconciliation.
2. Eliminate Duplicate Data Entry Across Systems
One of the biggest frustrations with expense management is duplication.
Employees enter expenses in one system. Finance re-enters or adjusts them in another. Project teams maintain their own trackers. Spreadsheets multiply quietly.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations removes this duplication by unifying expense data across project management and finance.
When an expense is submitted:
- It flows into project cost tracking
- It posts to the appropriate financial accounts
- It becomes visible in project and financial reports
There is no need to re-key data, upload files across systems, or reconcile mismatched numbers at month-end.
For professional services firms, this integration is critical. It reduces errors, saves time, and ensures everyone is working from the same version of the truth.
This is expense management automation doing real work, not just speeding up forms.
3. Automate Expense Policies Without Slowing People Down
Expense policies exist for good reasons. But when policies are enforced manually, they slow everything down.
Employees guess what is allowed. Managers approve to avoid conflict. Finance rejects later. The cycle repeats.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 expense management, policies are built directly into the workflow.
This means:
- Category limits are enforced at submission
- Required receipts are flagged immediately
- Approval paths adjust based on project or role
- Out-of-policy expenses are highlighted early
Employees know instantly if something does not meet policy. Managers review with full context. Finance spends less time correcting and more time analyzing.
The key point is subtle. Control increases, but friction decreases. Governance becomes part of the process rather than a separate enforcement step.
That balance is essential in professional services environments where speed matters.
4. Improve Reimbursements Without Losing Financial Control
Reimbursements are emotional.
From an employee’s perspective, delayed reimbursement feels personal. From Finance’s perspective, rushing payments without validation creates risk.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations helps firms improve reimbursement speed without compromising control.
Approved expenses are:
- Clearly tracked as liabilities
- Visible to finance teams in real time
- Ready for processing without rework
Because approvals and validations happen earlier in the process, reimbursement does not depend on last-minute checks.
This creates a healthier dynamic:
- Employees trust the system
- Finance maintains discipline
- Cash flow forecasting improves
For growing professional services firms, this balance is not optional. It directly affects morale and retention.
5. Gain Real-Time Visibility into Project Costs
The biggest failure of poor expense management is delayed insight.
Projects often appear profitable until expenses arrive weeks or months later. By then, the opportunity to correct course is gone.
With expense management capabilities in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, expenses update project costs continuously.
This allows firms to:
- Monitor project margins in near real time
- Identify cost overruns early
- Adjust delivery or billing decisions quickly
- Improve forecasting accuracy
Instead of explaining surprises after the fact, teams manage outcomes while there is still time to act.
For professional services leaders, this visibility changes conversations. Reviews become proactive instead of defensive.
How Dynamics 365 Project Operations Simplifies Expense Workflows
Taken together, these capabilities answer a common question:
How does Project Operations automate expense workflows?
It does so by embedding expense management into the same system that manages:
- Projects
- Resources
- Expenses
- Billing
There is no handoff between disconnected tools. No delayed reconciliation. No parallel tracking.
This integration is what makes expense management Dynamics 365 fundamentally different from standalone tools.
Best Practices for Professional Services Firms
To get the most from expense management for professional services, firms should focus on a few best practices:
- Tie every expense to a project wherever possible
- Configure policies based on delivery realities
- Encourage timely submissions with simple workflows
- Review project costs weekly, not monthly
- Treat expense data as operational insight, not just accounting input
Technology enables this, but discipline sustains it.
Final Thoughts
Expense management will never be exciting. But it does not need to be complicated.
For professional services firms, the real challenge is not capturing expenses. It is connecting them to projects, margins, and decisions quickly enough to matter.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations simplifies expense management by eliminating duplication, automating workflows, and embedding financial control directly into project execution.
Microsoft has also made significant R&D investments in the Expense Management module. They include:
- Mobile app for expense claim submission
- Enhanced approval workflows, showing a complete audit trail of approvals to enable better compliance and governance
- Mapping of travel requisitions with claims, to establish an approval trail from the requisition stage
- AI assisted preparation of expense claims, receipt matching and error detection
When supported by an experienced Microsoft partner like Alletec, Dynamics 365 Project Operations can turn expense management from an operational burden into a scalable, well-governed part of project execution.
The result is less time spent on administration, stronger cost control, and better outcomes for employees, finance teams, and leadership alike.
That is not a back-office improvement. It is a business advantage.
