How Expense Management Software Can Transform Your Bottom Line

For most organizations, expense management is a complex task, similar to other chores like payroll, benefits, and annual tax submission. The other primary concern is the hidden cost of persisting with manual expense management processes. As the number of employees increases, the cost of expense handling increases, and the process becomes complex.

Latest cloud-based solutions can eliminate time-consuming manual processes and transform how expenses are managed in an organization. Finance teams can gain real-time access to spend data and greater visibility over business expenses than traditional manual processes where expenses were processed once a quarter.

The demand for the latest expense management systems is increasing – the time-saving elements at all levels of the expense management process represent a significant advantage for finance teams. The enhanced visibility and seamless integration with third-party systems are other key benefits.

While online systems’ main benefits remain linked to productivity gains, the next level for expense management would be employee behavioural improvements. These will be based on using the advanced capabilities of expense management systems to make effective key changes – either by employees submitting expenses or through making changes based on insights unlocked from reviewing the data. Through these behavioural changes, better value can be unlocked going forward. If you have more employees incurring expenses regularly and if you can incentives and reward them for reasonable spending, the effect on the business bottom line will be greater. Let us see some of the key changes.

Streamlined Processes

Most employees act rationally when it comes to managing their expenses. They rush to submit expenses at the last minute – it may be the end of the month, quarter, or year. As a result, the pressure on the finance department increases, yet often hidden from the employees. This process has to be changed.

Online expense management systems are easy to use; they eliminate the need to store expenses and instead process them in real-time. The process of submitting an expense becomes easy; employees can simply take a photo of the receipt with their mobile and store them on the go.

For most companies, the cost of processing expenses using a mobile app is enough to change the way employees submit expenses forever.

Employee Incentives

Most organizations cap spend amounts for specific expense categories, such as overnight stays at hotels, airfare, etc. Some employees may wish to stay in a nice hotel as close to the cap amount as possible.

Rewarding employees who have the biggest gap between the cap and their spending can be a crucial step in the expense management process. When you have quick access to reports and data, rewarding employees becomes easy. Automated expense management systems with advanced dashboard make this process simpler.

Greater Visibility into Employee Spends

For most finance professionals, the total time spent on managing expenses leaves little time for other tasks. Latest cloud-based solutions typically offer a range of reporting functionality that provides real-time updates on business-wide expenses.

With less administration work, finance teams can use real-time data to plan the business budget or access main spend categories to reduce the spend amount. Even on the individual level, it will be easy to understand what a typical category expense should average and can focus on employees that are overspending.

Rest APIs

The advances in API empower businesses to easily integrate expense management systems with accounting applications, as well as banks. This development eliminates the need for manual processes and keying data into multiple systems.

The ability to directly reimburse employees means the expense management process could be reduced to a single monthly invoice.

E-Receipts

As we move towards digitization, the impact on expense management processes will be significant. Businesses that continue with paper-based processes will struggle to keep up.

With the integration between various applications, receipts sent to an email account can be moved automatically to expense management software without wasting the users’ time.

Modern solutions are built for this digital world, and the companies that leverage these advanced solutions will be ahead of the curve.

Today, the way online expense management solutions have the potential to offer essential changes to employee behaviors offers several opportunities for businesses to extract value impacting the bottom line. An advanced software solution like SutiExpense helps you save time managing your employee expenses online. The solution transforms the entire expense management processes by digitizing reports and eliminating manual interventions.