How to Make an Expense Report: The Complete 2025 Guide for Sales Teams

Let's be honest: nothing kills the momentum of a great sales month faster than the dreaded phrase, "expense reports are due." Suddenly, you're digging through your glove compartment for a crumpled receipt, trying to remember the details of a client lunch from three weeks ago. It’s a time-consuming, frustrating process that pulls you away from what you do best: selling.

But what if the process could be simpler? What if the administrative work that surrounds your sales activities—including logging the context of those expenses—could be almost entirely automated? This guide will walk you through the essential steps of how to make an expense report and reveal how top-performing sales teams are transforming this administrative burden into a competitive advantage.

Why Traditional Expense Reporting Fails Sales Teams

For sales professionals, an expense report isn't just a list of transactions; it's the financial footprint of your relationship-building and deal-closing efforts. Yet, the traditional process actively works against you.

The core problem is the immense administrative drag. When you’re spending hours manually keying in receipt data, you're not on the phone with prospects, you're not drafting proposals, and you're not closing deals. This isn't just an inconvenience; it's a direct hit to your productivity and your pipeline.

The numbers don't lie:

• Finance teams are overwhelmed: A staggering 60% of finance teams spend more than two hours per day just reviewing and approving expense reports. This bottleneck trickles down, causing delays and frustration for everyone.

• Compliance is a constant struggle: Manual tracking makes it hard to enforce policies. In fact, 71% of finance leaders report struggling with expense compliance and fraud prevention because of outdated manual systems.

For a sales rep, this translates to time wasted, reimbursement delays, and a process that feels completely disconnected from the actual work of generating revenue.

The Step-by-Step Guide: How to Make an Expense Report (The Right Way)

Before we get to automation, it’s crucial to understand the fundamentals. A clean, accurate report is the foundation of a smooth process.

Step 1: Gather and Organize Your Documentation

This is the most critical step. You can’t report what you can’t prove. Keep a dedicated folder, envelope, or digital repository for all business-related receipts.

• What to keep: Itemized receipts (not just the credit card slip), invoices, travel confirmations, and mileage logs.

• Best practice: Digitize receipts immediately. Use your phone to snap a picture the moment you get one. This prevents loss and fading.

Step 2: Categorize and Itemize Each Expense

Don't lump everything together. Your company needs to properly account for spending. Common categories for sales include:

• Travel: Flights, hotels, rental cars, public transit.

• Meals & Entertainment: Client dinners, coffee meetings, team lunches.

• Office Supplies: Business cards, software subscriptions, notebooks.

• Mileage: The distance driven in your personal vehicle for business purposes.

For each item, you’ll typically need the date, vendor name, amount, and business purpose. That last part—business purpose—is where most sales reps lose valuable time and context.

Step 3: Fill Out the Report Form

Whether you're using a spreadsheet template or a dedicated software platform, transfer the information from your receipts to the form. Double-check your math and ensure every field is completed accurately to avoid having your report kicked back.

Step 4: Submit for Approval

Submit your report by the deadline, attaching all your digitized receipts and supporting documents. Now, the waiting game begins as it moves through the approval workflow.

The Real Problem: It’s Not the Expense, It's the Lost Context

Following the steps above will get your report filed. But it completely misses the most valuable piece of information for a sales organization: the why.

A line item that says "$150 at The Capital Grille" is just a number to the finance team. But for your sales manager and the business, the real value was in the conversation that happened over that meal. Was it where you secured a verbal commitment for a Q4 contract renewal? Did you uncover a new upsell opportunity?

This crucial context usually lives in one of two places: your memory or, ideally, your CRM. But getting it into the CRM is another manual, time-consuming task. You finish a client dinner, drive home, and then have to log into your computer to type out meeting notes. It’s one more administrative hurdle that slows you down.

This is where the disconnect happens. Your expenses are tied to your sales activities, but your reporting process is completely siloed from your sales workflow in Salesforce.

Bridge the Gap with Voice-Powered CRM Updates

What if you could capture the expense context and update your CRM in seconds, without ever opening your laptop? This is where modern sales tools change the game.

Imagine this: you've just finished that productive client dinner. As you walk to your car, you simply speak into your phone:

"Hey Colby, update the John Smith opportunity in Salesforce. We had a client dinner, expense was $150. He’s ready to move forward with the premium package and wants a final proposal by Friday. Create a follow-up task for me for tomorrow morning to draft it."

In that one voice command, getcolby.com has:

1. Logged the critical meeting notes directly to the correct Salesforce opportunity.

2. Created an actionable follow-up task so nothing slips through the cracks.

3. Provided the business context for the $150 expense, justifying its ROI.

While Colby isn't an expense filing tool itself, it solves the much larger problem of sales admin friction. It ensures the valuable data from your sales activities—the very activities that generate expenses—is captured instantly and accurately in the system that matters most: your CRM.

Ready to stop typing and start selling? See how Colby can cut your Salesforce admin time in half.

The Future is Automated: 2025 Trends in Management

The entire landscape of business administration is shifting. According to industry analysis, automation-driven approval workflows are becoming crucial in 2025. Companies that embrace this shift are seeing massive returns. Research from McKinsey & Co. found that businesses using AI-driven expense tracking save an average of $75 per report.

This automation comes in two forms:

1. Dedicated Expense Tools: Platforms like ExpenseOut and Expense Tracker 365 use AI for receipt scanning and policy compliance, streamlining the financial side of the process.

2. Sales Productivity Tools: This is where getcolby.com shines. It tackles the admin work within your sales workflow. By making it effortless to update Salesforce with key details from client meetings, phone calls, and even research requests (e.g., "Colby, find all companies in Seattle with over $100M in AUA"), it frees up hours of your time each week.

The smartest sales teams use both—an efficient tool for the financial report and a powerful AI assistant to handle the revenue-critical data entry.

Learn more about reducing sales admin tasks with AI.

Stop Just Filing Reports. Start Driving Revenue.

Creating an expense report is a necessary part of the job, but it shouldn't define your week or steal your focus. By mastering the basic steps and embracing modern tools, you can transform it from a painful chore into a streamlined process.

But don't stop there. The real opportunity lies in automating the administrative tasks that surround your sales activities. Capturing the context behind every client lunch and travel leg is what separates good sales reps from great ones. It provides visibility for your manager, justifies your spending, and keeps your pipeline data rich and accurate.

Stop letting manual CRM updates and administrative drag dictate your selling time. It’s time to automate the work that doesn’t move the needle so you can focus on what does.

Ready to see how an AI Salesforce assistant can give you back hours of selling time every week? Explore getcolby.com today and book a demo.