How To Minimize Costs While Enhancing Productivity

Many organizations struggle to find the right balance between reducing costs and growing their business. For some, it seems like an impossible equation, for others it’s a great challenge. Businesses tend to overlook one very crucial aspect of their daily activities when thinking about cost savings – manual tasks, and they can’t be more wrong. The cost of manual tasks, in most scenarios, exceeds their value and end up costing them a lot of money. This is why automating low-value tasks is crucial to minimize spending, enhance efficiency and boost revenues. One of these tasks is expense management.

Manual and inefficient expense process can be very frustrating, here we present a few tips to reduce costs while increasing productivity.

Automated Technology

Manually filling expense reports, stapling receipts, reconciling expenses with credit card statements etc., all of these make expense management a tedious process. With these processes, finance teams lack visibility on actual spending making businesses very exposed to compliance breaches. The cost of manual expense management hides incredible savings opportunities. An automated expense management solution updates processes for the digital age, enabling remote, mobile and real-time management of expenses. By eliminating manual interventions and automating processes, businesses can decrease handoffs, reduce the number of lost receipts, automate compliance checks and minimize fraud risks.

An automated platform with mobile applications and robust features, make expense reporting a matter of just a few clicks. Employees scan their receipts using their mobile phone and the solution automatically pulls out all the relevant data using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. The receipts are allocated to the right cost center and general ledger and are made available to review in real-time for approvers and finance teams. Expenses can be approved /rejected as soon as they are submitted by the employees using their mobile applications.

Cloud-based Platforms

Businesses who have started using a basic expense management systems to manage their expenses are moving towards increased security, but they are usually only semi-automated and still require multiple-hand-offs. Missing documentation and incorrect information are still being a challenge. An automated cloud-based system would be more efficient and would help businesses put in place new processes allowing for real-time expense management and reporting.

Transparency

Transparency in expense management process is an essential aspect for the management and finance teams. While expense management systems make very useful information – imperative to control and spot false activities – hard to extract, automated systems are designed to identify patterns and provide insights and visibility on your organization’s spending. Reports detailing out of policy expenses, departments’ spending habits, and user analysis can be created within the solution, in just a few clicks. The robust analytics offered by the solution allow companies to take action to instantly correct behavior or reconsider budgets.

Manual expense management is time-consuming and by selecting and implementing the right expense management system businesses can reverse that tendency.