Open almost any vendor scorecard for expense reimbursement software, and the headline metric is the same: average days to reimburse. Faster is framed as better, full stop. Vendors compete on it, procurement teams shortlist on it, and CFOs report it upward as evidence the T&E function is running well.

I want to make the case that this metric, on its own, tells you almost nothing about whether your organization is managing reimbursed expenses responsibly, and that optimizing for it in isolation can actively make your spend control worse, not better.

What Time-to-Reimbursement Actually Measures

Time-to-reimbursement measures exactly one thing – the interval between an employee submitting a claim and receiving payment. That’s it. It says nothing about whether the underlying expense was appropriate, whether it matched policy, whether it was accurately categorized, or whether anyone meaningfully reviewed it before the money moved.

Here’s the part that should give any controller pause: those two things, speed and scrutiny, are frequently in direct tension. The fastest possible expense reimbursement process is one where nothing gets reviewed at all. Every additional check, validation step, or human review adds time. So, when an organization sets “reduce time-to-reimbursement” as its primary KPI without a paired control metric, it is, whether anyone intends it or not, incentivizing less scrutiny in exchange for more speed.

The IRS Already Solved This Problem – Differently Than Most Companies Have

There’s a useful reference point here that most finance teams overlook. The IRS’s own accountable plan rules don’t optimize for speed at all. To qualify as an accountable plan, meaning reimbursements are excluded from taxable wages, an expense reimbursement policy has to meet three tests, i.e., the expense needs a genuine business connection, the employee has to substantiate it within a reasonable period, and any excess advance has to be returned within a reasonable period. The IRS defines that reasonable period as a safe harbor of 60 days for substantiation and 120 days for returning excess advances.

Read that again. The federal government’s own standard for a compliant travel expense reimbursement process gives employees up to 60 days just to substantiate an expense, not to receive payment, to document it. Most corporate scorecards are chasing reimbursement speeds measured in single-digit days, an order of magnitude faster than the compliance standard actually requires. That’s not a criticism of speed itself. It’s evidence that the urgency behind time-to-reimbursement as a metric is coming from somewhere other than regulatory necessity, mostly from employee experience pressure and vendor marketing, not from any control requirement.

What Gets Hidden When Speed Is the Only Number on the Dashboard

Consider what a company optimizing purely for reimbursement speed doesn’t see in its own numbers:

Error rates baked into the process.

GBTA Foundation research on expense reporting found that nearly one in five reports contain errors requiring correction, adding real time and cost once you account for rework. A time-to-reimbursement metric doesn’t distinguish between a report that moved fast because it was clean and one that moved fast because nobody caught the error before payment went out. Both show up identically on the scorecard.

Fraud windows that speed doesn’t close.

The ACFE’s Occupational Fraud 2024 Report to the Nations found that expense reimbursement schemes remain a persistent category of asset misappropriation, with typical schemes running around 12 months before detection. A faster reimbursement cycle doesn’t shrink that detection window. If anything, a program racing to minimize time-to-payment has less structural incentive to build in the review steps that catch fraud in the first place.

Policy exceptions quietly waved through.

When speed is the metric being measured and rewarded, the path of least resistance for anyone under pressure to hit that number is to approve first and question later. Employee expense reimbursement processes under speed pressure develop a bias toward approval, because every additional question asked shows up as a delay on someone’s dashboard.

The Metric That Actually Matters: Reimbursement Accuracy, Not Reimbursement Speed

If time-to-reimbursement is measuring the wrong outcome, what should replace it, not entirely, but as the primary number CFOs report upward? A few candidates that actually reflect whether the program is under control:

1. First-pass accuracy rate

What percentage of submitted expense reimbursements are approved and paid without any correction, resubmission, or manual intervention? This tells you whether your process is fast because it’s clean, or fast because nobody’s checking. A high first-pass accuracy rate paired with reasonable speed is a genuinely good outcome. Speed alone is not.

2. Post-payment exception discovery rate

How many reimbursed expenses get flagged as non-compliant after payment, during audit or periodic review, rather than before? A rising post-payment exception rate is one of the clearest signals that a program has optimized itself into approving things it shouldn’t, in service of a speed target.

3. Policy override frequency

Every time an exception gets manually approved rather than resolved, that’s a data point about whether policy is actually governing behavior or just providing cover. If overrides are climbing while time-to-reimbursement is falling, those two trends are very likely connected.

4. Substantiation completeness, not just submission speed

Speed at which an employee submits a claim doesn’t tell you whether the claim came with adequate documentation. A reimbursement processed in two days with a missing or unclear receipt is a bigger risk than one processed in five days with complete, policy-compliant documentation attached from the start.

Why Employee Experience Doesn’t Actually Require Sacrificing Control

I want to head off the obvious objection – isn’t fast reimbursement good for employee satisfaction and retention? Genuinely, yes! Nobody should be waiting weeks to get their own money back for a legitimate business expense, and a poorly run reimbursement process is a real source of employee frustration.

But this is a false tradeoff, not a real one. The choice isn’t between “fast and uncontrolled” or “slow and controlled.” A modern expense reimbursement software with embedded policy validation, OCR-based receipt matching, and automated duplicate detection can deliver both because the scrutiny happens at machine speed, in parallel with the submission, rather than as a manual bottleneck that trades time for review. The false tradeoff only exists in organizations still relying on manual review as their only control mechanism, where every additional check genuinely does cost calendar days.

The real fix isn’t slowing down reimbursement to add more scrutiny. It’s making the scrutiny itself fast enough that it stops being the thing standing between an employee and their money, which is a technology and process design question, not a “pick one” tradeoff between employees and control.

What This Looks Like on a Rebuilt Scorecard

If I were rebuilding the quarterly T&E scorecard for a CFO, time-to-reimbursement wouldn’t disappear; it’s a legitimate secondary metric. It just wouldn’t sit alone at the top. Instead:

• First-pass accuracy rate as the primary quality signal.
• Time-to-reimbursement reported alongside it, as a secondary efficiency metric, never in isolation.
• Post-payment exception rate, trended quarter over quarter.
• Policy override frequency, to catch creeping approval-first behavior before it becomes systemic.

None of these require sacrificing the employee experience gains that made fast reimbursement attractive in the first place. They just refuse to let speed stand in as a proxy for quality because it isn’t one, and treating it like one is how travel expense reimbursement and employee expense reimbursement programs quietly drift out of control while every dashboard says things are getting better.

The Test for Your Next Scorecard Review

Before your next T&E vendor renewal or scorecard refresh, ask this one question.

If time-to-reimbursement went up next quarter because your team caught more errors and exceptions before payment, would that read as a win or a loss on your current dashboard?

If the honest answer is “loss,” you’re not measuring spend control. You’re measuring how fast money leaves the building, and those are not the same thing, no matter how closely the two numbers have sat side by side on your reporting deck.

About ExpenseAnywhere

ExpenseAnywhere’s platform validates expenses against company policy and checks for duplicates. It matches receipts using OCR and AI at the point of submission, so accuracy checks happen in parallel with processing rather than as a separate manual step that slows down payment. That design lets finance teams track both first-pass accuracy and reimbursement speed without treating one as a tradeoff against the other.