How Retailers Can Go Cashless with the New Age Expense Management Solutions

The gradual development of the e-commerce market has led the retail industry to stay on its toes and keep up with the competition. Brands and businesses are inventing new ways to stand out by generating value-added customer experiences- in store as well as online. Elementary features such as consistency, speed, and optimization are on the forefront, thus adding up to high customer satisfaction and experience.

Starting from fixtures, inventory levels, packing, and point of sale service need to work in a cycle, but it finally comes down to money needed for running such interconnected procedures. Staff working inside these stores always need to access money whenever required to run all processes smoothly and efficiently.

Difficulties of Managing Cash in Retail Outlets

Managing all the daily expenditures in a store is a daunting task. How often do you find a senior executive physically visiting a retail store and distributing cash to find out that the amount he handed over was insufficient, leading to delays in further payments?

Here are three common critical problems in this situation-
1. Stores lack transparency of exactly how much cash they need.
2. Time and cost spent by a senior executive or manager physically going between the stores.
3. Funds are falling short resulting in weak cash flow.

Manual processes can result in human error, failing to maintain receipts and losing cash. The store personnel dip into petty cash in order to recur operating expenses instead of raising separate cash requests and submitting the expense claims. With typical submissions of petty cash bills and vouchers at the end of the month, the finance department has to spend more time reconciling the accounts manually than if they implemented an automated system.

Reconciliation delays results and the transferring of funds for the upcoming month and the cycle continues. Traditional expense management system crumbles as the number of stores increases thus resulting in accounting errors, cash leakages, and inefficient cash distribution.

Controlling the Cash Flow

Being a multi-chain retail owner, take the cash factor out of the equation. Are you thinking of ways to do this? You can easily do it by replacing cash with prepaid cards and switching to an effective expense management solution in the market that will allow you to transfer cash and control or monitor cash spent across the stores from a user-friendly online platform.

Digital Petty Cash Solution for Monitoring and Transferring Funds

With digital petty cash solution, you can load petty cash funds online on every store’s card. Whenever your store staff starts spending the funds, being an administrator you can monitor expenses and card balances through real-time data feeds. You can always stay acquainted with the expenses and know exactly when to restock funds. Though you have real-time fund transferability at your fingertips, no need to transfer funds immediately. Easily schedule and pace the funds that each store is available to maintain control of your cash flow.

Technology can Simplify Cash Reporting

The modern technology and mobility empower your staff to submit their bills and cash spend on the go. An automated expense management solution enables store managers and finance department to approve expenses online and complete reconciliation within a couple of hours instead of a few weeks.

Spend Analytics for Making Better Decisions

Analytical dashboards offered by expense management software allow administrators to gain insights into company spending patterns. Break down these analytics into certain time frames, spend categories, stores and employees to get detailed reports. Detailed analytics will help you monitor and asses the funds needed for each store or department, manage cash flows and detect and rectify any anomalies in the total spend.

To Sum Up

Digitization of cash management helps in reducing your operational costs. Organizations using mobile expense management solution save almost 82% of the cost spent on recruiting employees to manage manual or labor-intensive processes and save almost 78% of the overall cost.