5 Goals An Expense Management Tool Can Help You Reach

Building a business in a digital era means keeping up with the latest technologies, including updates related to your employee expense management tool. Like it or not, technologies move fast as new ones appear and business tools become more powerful than the ones you and your teams are familiar with.

But when your company struggles to meet its goals regarding expense management, using an up-to-date tool becomes imperative. You know that the employee expense management tool that you are using is outdated when:

• Your employees are inundated with paperwork and your controllers find a lot of errors in expense reports;
• The time spent by your teams on manual work has increased and keeps them from doing their job;
• Your business travellers are failing to submit expense claims on time and your company has started to have cash flow problems;
• Your travellers keep complaining that they are not reimbursed on time for their out of pocket business expenses, and reimbursement is delayed by the need to manually check compliance;
• Expense reports are inaccurate and you do not have enough or relevant data to identify the source of increasing travel expenses, other than those which are out of your company's control (e.g. increased airfare and accommodation prices).

In order to future-proof your expense management strategies, you need an expense management tool that has all the features and updates that will help your business thrive, while reducing costs and offering support for expense management improvement. Here are just five goals that you can achieve with an updated expense management tool.

Automate time consuming processes

If you have a expense management tool, but still have a lot of tasks related to business expenses that your employees complete manually, you are certainly using an outdated solution. Automating processes will save you time and money on the long term and immediately increase employee satisfaction. Automate the pre-approval and approval process and automatically prevent out of policy submissions. Your travelling employees and your financial team will really appreciate a user friendly solution that gives them more time to spend on more appealing tasks.

Take control of employee spend

When corporate expenses - especially those related to travel - continue to increase, taking control of employee spend becomes a real challenge if your financial team does not have the tools to identify, evaluate and correct employee behaviours. An updated expense management software automates internal processes and integrates with other software in your company to help your financial team identify trends and take immediate and relevant action.

Generate better compliance with corporate policies

You know that business trips are tiring for your employees. And preparing expense reports is last on their list of priorities while away generating new business opportunities or maintaining good relations with your business partners.

An expense management tool that helps you prepare for the future allows you to not only automate processes, but also submit expenses on the go with cloud-based apps for your travelling employees. That means your employees can submit their receipts as they receive them and the integration of your expense management solution with the company's policy ensures the compliance of all your travellers.

Improve employee experience

In order to get the most out of your expense management tools, you must ensure that it is user-friendly and that your employees are happy to use them while making them aware of the benefits they obtain from using the solution you have chosen.

Do not forget that your employees need guidance, a clear corporate policy travel tools, transparency and visibility for their business trip data. Having an updated expense management solution means that you are able to make the best decisions in order to decrease costs without cutting off traveler benefits and without affecting the quality of travel.

Take informed decisions

Integration of your T&E management tool with different corporate systems that your company uses, such as the ERP system, has a measurable impact on your travel management and financial management. An updated tool offers increased compliance, automated processes, employee satisfaction and a lot of valuable data that is always available. And, most important, it is both accurate and reliable. Your managers can obtain valuable insights and make informed decisions based on the available data regarding business expenses.

You are constantly watching trends in your company's field of activity in order to keep your products and services as high quality possible and to prepare your business for the future. As travel expenses are the second largest cost in most companies with global activities, you want to keep travel expenses under control. Doing so in the future means updating your expense management tool now.