How Can CFOs Gain Control Over Expense Management
Today, the coronavirus pandemic has posed several challenges for CFOs to handle their corporate travel and expense spending. Considering the importance of the situation, it is time for the CFOs to step out and reexamine the different expense management strategies in place in order to keep the business expenses in control and prevent fraudulent activities.
They must invest in digital transformation of the expense management procedure and embrace modern technologies, such as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to be ahead of their competition.
Here we present the best tactics that your CFOs must deploy to streamline the expense management workflow in the long run.
a. More transparency into corporate travel spending
A good travel and expense software can aid CFOs bring transparency in the travel costs by monitoring expenses accurately and whenever they take place.
Overall, robust expense automation system can save you productive hours and money while also keeping the workers more productive and happy.
b. Create accountability
Many established procedures can facilitate workers to depend on and refer them daily. The initial step is to make sure that all the employers, supervisors, and staff remain aware of the company’s travel and expense policies.
Your senior management should have easy access to expense reporting that their staff is submitting. Cloud-based expense software can bring more power to the employers with customized/hierarchical approval workflow for every team. Moreover, it ensures a high level of accountability.
c. Importance of Audit
The CFOs at your company must audit their expenses daily in order to keep fraudulent activities at bay and detect the lapses in the expense management method/ policies. Expense tracking audits can pinpoint on the potential issues, such as fraudulent expense receipts, overspending, and so much more to help your finance department to make more strategic decisions.
d. Simplicity in expense budget
At times, several organizations point out to the corporate travel costs as the most significant budget items. Hence, as a result, the CFOs should develop a proper travel and expense (T&E) policy, which is easy to understand and reasonable.
It involves setting an optimal budget for every spending category, such as corporate trips, restaurant charges, and much more based on the staff designation and team. By enforcing clear T&E policies can help you incur advantages, such as audit readiness, spend insights, preventing fraud, audit readiness, and more.
e. Make more prompt business decisions
The modern trends and statistics associated to expense reporting and policy violations aid you to formulate better policies. So, expense analytics is critical for your business as it is valuable for making all data-driven decisions, which can save your millions of dollars in spending. Moreover, it allows companies to compare the costs with budgets to make sure that they aren’t overspending.
f. Offers security
It has been observed that the average expense of a data breach rose to $5 million in the previous year. It is an increase from $3.9 million in 2020.
Due to this reason, businesses should use robust expense management tools to keep the company’s sensitive financial details safe from the security breaches.
g. Staff expenses and targeted insights
The reports aid you to examine staff expenses and check analytic reports of a policy violation to monitor overspending.
You can assess and track the costs based on categories, projects, merchants, and so much more.
h. Digitize traditional workflows
It has been observed that processing an expense report can take up to 20 minutes and may cost your business $60. Automation eradicates the use of paper and excel sheets, minimizes heavy administrative work, and leads to processing reimbursement quickly. Hence, if CFOs prioritize digitizing your expense management procedure, it can undoubtedly yield good results and enable your accounting and finance leaders to focus on the economic development of the business.
i. Check for real-time upgrades
Now you can monitor the number of reimbursements and the cash advances processed for a certain period of time.
To Sum Up
The CFOs must consider deploying all these strategies to take full control of business expense management and make prompt decisions on the spending in the future. The best expense solution helps you to enforce travel and expense policies, thus saving your valuable time and effort.
