Expense Management Software: How Your Business Benefits

Does the thought of expense reports instantly give you the chills? If so, chances are that your company uses outdated systems and could benefit from an automated expense management software.

Continuing to rely on excel spreadsheets and paper receipts, or even an older expense solution, will generate more problems than it solves. Especially if your goal is to gain more control over your organisation's expenses.

One of the main challenges you face with manual processing of expense reports is the time it takes, at every step of the way. And as we know, time is money, so how does expense management software improve that equation?

Less time wasted

Expense management software helps your employees eliminate time consuming tasks with little added value such as manually entering expenses in a report and attaching physical receipts. Due to the tiresome nature of these tasks, many employees postpone them, causing issues with your accounts and their own reimbursements!

Furthermore, automating your approval processes helps increase compliance with corporate policy while decreasing the occurrence of errors and fraud. This saves time for the submitting employee (no more mistakes to correct), the approver (compliant items can be automatically approved) and the controller (out of policy items are visually flagged)!

Submitting and tracking receipts

We can all agree that manually submitting expense claims, with all their receipts, is a tedious task. Not only is it time consuming, but it can also be frustrating when a receipt is misplaced or an item forgotten.

Your employees should be focusing on their higher added value tasks, not on corralling bits and pieces of paper. With a mobile expense app based on Optical Character Recognition, expenses can be created immediately with a simple tap on a mobile device. While OCR extracts the data, the image is stored digitally meaning no more faded receipts in random jacket pockets.

Digitally tracking and submitting expenses ensures that there are no losses, no duplicates, and no delays in expense claims.

Lower cost per expense report

With the simple shift from manual to automatic expense report processing, your organisation will benefit from interesting cost savings.

On average, an expense report costs EUR 25 to process manually. In comparison, it only costs about EUR 6 to automatically process expense reports. That's less than a quarter of the cost.

Investing in an expense management solution is therefore a surefire way to reach your cost savings goal, especially in times when spend control is key.

Improved visibility

Expense management software makes it easier for your company to keep track of spending. Because you can't manage what you can't measure, it is important to be able to accurately measure your expenses so as to assess and possibly reduce your costs.

Automation improves your expense tracking, processing and storing, but it also provides you with business intelligence tools to give you visibility over and help you analyse your spending. Whether you are interested in a high level view or drilling down into business units, you can do both. Because the data going into the application is more accurate, so are your reports, creating a solid base on which to make your strategic decisions.

Increased employee satisfaction

When you make it faster and easier for employees to claim their expenses, you're also making things easier on yourself. Gone are the days of receiving daily complaints regarding a complicated expense reporting process. Forgotten are the times when employees would demand weekly payment updates or blame the company for outstanding payments.

Besides, happy employees are 13% more productive. This means that by simply automating your expense management, not only will you be saving time and money, you will also be increasing your company's overall productivity.

Heightened company policy compliance

Fraud is an unfortunate reality for any company, but even more so companies that rely on manual cost control. Human error also factors into company losses. Expense management automation does away with both fraud and errors with integrated cross-checks and controls.

It allows you to identify and prevent mistakes and abuses before they take place, preventing that cash from ever unnecessarily leaving your account. Automated expense management also improves policy compliance as well as employee knowledge of your policies. And if a fraudster knows they are likely to get caught, they will think twice before submitting that fake receipt.

The best expense management system is the one that grows with you and helps improve your productivity.