As you try to scale your business up, how do you keep a track of your expenses? Well, expense tracking turns out to be a critical aspect within the ambit of accounting and planning. Without a dedicated expense management software like Monite, you won’t be knowing the loopholes leading to excess spending.
Traditionally, small businesses and startups use paper vouchers and spreadsheets to manually enter the expense data. This process is susceptible to human errors. Now, with your business growing, you would have to manually track expenses in different locations. At the same time, you would have to monitor the expenses of a larger workforce.
Considering the challenges in the process, it makes sense to deploy a smart expense management tool.
What is expense management?
Expense management involves the entire mechanism that encompasses reporting expenses, and getting them approved and reimbursed. As a business owner, you would expect a transparent system to track the expenses of your employees and organization. This is where an expense management tool comes in handy.
Different departments in your organization incur expenses under several heads each day. This might be related to the procurement of raw materials, travel allowances, food allowances for your employees, and other spendings. It’s imperative to compile all these expenses and reimburse your employees with the amount they deserve. At the same time, you might have some spending policies in place that prevents your employees from pitching for reimbursing the wrong amount. With a customizable expense management software, you can automate this process to streamline your operations.
The best expense management tools are powerful enough to streamline the report submission of expenses, monitor travel bookings, pacify approvals, and ensure that the employees receive the reimbursements fast. Besides, the tools allow business owners to track claims later on.
What does the expense management process involve?
A typical expense management software functions in the following way.
- Your employees submit their expense claims using the software.
- The departmental managers scrutinize the expense claims
- Based on the validity of the claims, they approve or reject the reports
- Next, your finance department would audit the report to ensure compliance
- Lastly, the software schedules payment to the deserving employees
- For external audits, the expense management tool retains all the records and receipts
How would you benefit from an expense management software?
Keep track of your receipts
- When it comes to reporting the expenses of your business, you need to furnish the receipts. With a dedicated expense management tool, you have different methods for uploading the receipts, updating them, and retrieving information when you need it.
- Rather than cluttering up your commercial space with physical copies of receipts, you can digitally store the images of bills. Working with e-receipts, you can get rid of the hassles of losing the hard copies of invoices.
- You can instantly track all your receipts, that remain stored in a cloud system. Therefore, even if your departments are operating remotely, you can access the bills for better convenience.
- When it comes to auditing, the system eases up the process for accountants. They can seamlessly track every expense that you have reimbursed. With the supporting evidence available in the system, you can speed up the auditing process.
Enforce your reimbursement policies
One of the prime benefits of using an expense management software is the ability to enforce spending policies. These powerful tools come with the provision to ensure that you can track any violation of the policy.
- As soon as an employee creates a business expense, the automated system scans it for violation. In case there is a breach, the authorized individuals would receive notifications instantly.
- You can also integrate the expense management software with corporate credit card program. Therefore, the employees receive bank feed directly, so that they can report all the expenses. The powerful tools are programmed to verify the expenses with the statements. In case of mismatches, the tool would inform the authority.
- You can modify these expense policies as required to fulfill your budgetary goals. In case of a policy violation, the authorized person reserves the right to decide the consequences.
In the competitive business environment, you would try to capitalize on every opportunity to curtail your expenses. With a dedicated expense management software, it becomes amazingly easy to track and reimburse the costs. In the process, you can streamline the process of audits as well. Considering these strategic benefits, you may get a feature-packed and customized expense management software.
