Does Expense Management Software Benefit Your Finance Department?

Think of a situation when the finance department is spending excessive money while processing reports, fraudulent claims go unnoticed, valuable time is unnecessarily wasted.

Sounds familiar?

This is true for organizations that are still following outdated/traditional expense management procedure. Your finance team members can’t do much with the legacy systems. Yet they still expect to be productive. It has been observed that 20% of expense reports are error prone.

More shockingly, these reports can cost around $58 to $60 dollars. And another $50 travels down the drain when the finance department has to make frequent corrections to an expense report.

The business can get into trouble during audit if the expense reports are found faulty and you can end up with a bleak picture on how toothless the team is without a cloud-based travel and expense management solution.

How does a robust expense system help you? Here we present the tangible advantages that the solution can bring to your finance department.

1. Simplified and Correct Expense Reimbursement/Processing

As T&E management system eradicates receipts, finance department no longer has to spend their valuable time over paper that are going to fall apart/misplaced or tampered. The system automatically informs them if the expense is policy compliant, which means that reimbursement will take a few minutes. Moreover, automation helps in eliminating mistakes that may often creep in when an arduous and lengthy method is involved.

2. Preventing Fraud and Policy Compliance

When the reimbursement is done on the merit of outdated receipts, there are higher chances of fraudulent expense claims. It has been observed in the United States that expense fraud costs businesses around $4 billion per year. When organizations automate policy compliance, they can make sure that the finance department receives original reports, which aren’t duplicated, fake, or inflated.

For example, expense automation software can identify when a worker is trying to pass off lunch with their family/friends as an outing with the lead. Also, the system comes in handy for the finance team members when it comes to rejecting expenses that have been reimbursed.

In addition, you can set customized spending regulations to the level of a user that makes the finance department’s work simpler as they don’t have to search via handbook each time before expense approval.

3. Deeper Data and Financial Insights

One of the significant advantages of leveraging a robust expense tracking solution is its ability to assess multiple data points to check trends and maverick spending. The real-time spending enables the team members to handle the allocated budget more effectively.

A centralized insight into the expense data and intuitive dashboards enables CFOs and finance experts validate data in multiple ways aiding them predict expenses and assigning budgets accordingly in the long run.

• All the expense and travel data are stored in a centralized location, enabling the finance department to gain complete visibility into travel and expense spending.
• Deeper analytics for making prompt corporate decisions.
• User-friendly dashboards with spend reports for streamlined expense reporting.

4. Regulatory Compliance

Some monetary indiscretion can lead organizations to losing money because of legal problems with the regulators. An expense management software solution aids the finance department to make sure that each instance of business spending follows international/national rules and regulations without complicated or error-prone manual audits.

5. Robust External Integrations

Travel and expense system can easily integrate with external tools like business travel agencies, online booking applications, ERP, and accounting systems. Because of this, the finance department no longer needs to spend their productive hours loading the data from a single platform to the other. Hence, as a result, every application ends with accurate and upgraded details that allow the finance department to minimize fraudulent activities and accelerate employee reimbursements.

Summary

While some companies are digitizing their finance methods, a few of them are yet to begin the digitization procedure. No matter in which stage you are present, a single finance method that you should automate is employee expense management.

Traditional expense management incurs a massive corporate expense. Plus, the process is ineffective and time-consuming. This forces the finance department to spend their time and effort on the repetitive activities instead of focusing on more critical tasks, such as forecasting, budgeting, and cost-saving in the future.

When you are still handling expenses on Excel sheets, it is high-time to move towards leveraging expense solution so that you can automate the rule-based activities and free-up your team’s bandwidth to make correct decisions aiding your business evolve.