Expense management is one of the time-intensive and cost-intensive business processes.
No organization can maintain a positive cash flow without recording, tracking, processing, and auditing expenses efficiently. Likewise, it must keep employees stress-free by accelerating employee expense reimbursement.
Enterprises have to overcome many challenges to process various types of expenses quickly and accurately.
Your organization can overcome common expense management challenges through automation. In addition to streamlining expense processing, an expense management solution will help your business overcome several shortcomings of the manual expense management process.
For instance, you can implement an expense management platform to overcome the major shortcomings of the manual expense management process, like human errors, approval delays, policy violations, and expense fraud.
Also, the software will make it easier for you to make data-driven decisions by facilitating expense tracking and expense data analysis.
If your organization is still managing expenses manually, you should understand the reasons why it is time for your company or startup to adopt an expense management solution.
9 Reasons Why Your Business Must Adopt an Expense Management Solution
1. Enforce Organizational Policies
In addition to sticking to a budget, a well-defined policy will help your business control unnecessary expenses.
Before incurring an expense or making a purchase, employees can refer to the organizational policy to know if they can claim expense reimbursement or not. The expense management system will help employees access the latest company policies seamlessly.
Hence, they will not incur any out-of-policy expenses that will not be reimbursed by your business.
At the same time, you can implement organizational policies while configuring the cloud-based expense management solution. The software will speed up expense processing by ensuring that employees comply with preset travel policies.
2. Streamline Approval Workflow
The travel policy will help employees identify and avoid non-reimbursable expenses. But your organization must allow employees to incur specific out-of-policy expenses after getting approval from relevant authorities.
The travel management solution will help your business get expense requests approved. While configuring the software, you can define multi-level approvers and custom approval workflow.
Hence, an employee can use the software to send requests to the appropriate authority.
The software will make the approver approve or reject the request quickly by sending automated notifications. The approval workflow customization will help your business ensure that employees can incur the necessary experience without any hassle or delay.
3. Simplify Expense Reporting
Their productivity is impacted when employees spend hours preparing expense reports manually.
Also, they have to spend more time rectifying the errors and inconsistencies detected by the finance team. An expense management platform will enable employees to generate digital expense reports in minutes by capturing data from receipts and invoices scanned by them.
At the same time, your finance team can review and process the automated expense reports without putting in extra time and effort.
4. Speed up Expense Reimbursements
In the post-pandemic age, some employees have returned to the office, while others are still working from home.
At the same time, many employees regularly travel for business processes. Hence, organizations have to reimburse a variety of expenses incurred by onsite and offsite employees.
Also, they eliminate stress by reimbursing employee-initiated expenses early. A travel management solution will speed up employee expense reimbursement by automating expense reporting and helping the finance team to manage the surge in expense claims.
5. Get Spend Visibility
Often small businesses and startups impact their cash flow position by not tracking ongoing expenses. The travel management solution will help you get visibility into various types of expenses by unifying and centralizing expense data.
You can use the dashboard provided by the software to track the paid and unpaid expenses in real-time. Also, the software will help you evaluate the real-time expense data based on various metrics by generating custom reports.
6. Prevent Expense Fraud
An expense management platform will help your company prevent expense fraud by ensuring policy compliance and eliminating expense filing errors.
Also, the new-generation expense management solutions detect various types of expense frauds – fictitious expenses, inflated expenses, duplicate reimbursements, and mischaracterized expenses – using intelligence technologies.
Also, they send you an automated notification each time an employee tries to execute expense fraud.
7. Conduct Regular Expense Audits
You can make employees differentiate between reimbursable and non-reimbursable expenses by implementing well-defined policies. But you can decide if expenses incurred by employees are necessary and relevant for your business only by conducting expense audits regularly.
The travel management solution will help you automate the expense audit process end-to-end. In addition to capturing approver workflow, the software will capture the comments made by approvers while approving or rejecting expense claims.
8. Make Informed Decisions
Expense management automation helps your business gather and unify expense data based on digital expense reports. You can analyze the expense data and get actionable insights effortlessly by investing in an expense management platform featuring analytics.
The actionable insights will make it easier for you to make informed decisions by identifying overspending, wasteful expenses, and expense policy violations.
9. Boost Operational Efficiency
Employees have to put in extra time and effort to submit expense claims reports. Likewise, the approvers need time to review, approve, and reimburse expenses accurately.
Hence, manual expense management impacts operational efficiency by reducing the productivity of employees. The expense management solution will make employees focus on important tasks and projects by eliminating paper-based expense reports.
Conclusion
In addition to saving time and resources, the expense management solution will help your streamline expense management and control ongoing costs. But you must focus on a slew of factors to adopt the right expense management platform.
For instance, you can curtail infrastructural overheads significantly by implementing a cloud-based expense management tool.
Also, you can configure, customize, and extend the cloud-based software according to precise business needs. At the same time, you can automate complex and interrelated processes simultaneously by investing in a unified travel and expense management solution.
That is why; your organization can leverage several benefits in the short and long runs only by adopting the right expense management software for small business.