How Innovo42 Uses Innovo Xpense — The Modern Admin’s Guide

Tips, insights and real examples from our team that will help you modernize your expense management workflow, gain visibility into expenses and become more productive.

Ten years ago, the productivity landscape was still limited, and the idea of automating processes was difficult to achieve.

As the digitization of services started booming, it immediately prompted companies to rewire the way they handle processes and workflows.

For businesses, this quickly translated into the need to grow and adopt new strategies to better manage and control their work. It also opened a new way to help organizations gain a competitive edge.

Around the world and in Southeast Asia, big players have exponentially contributed to this new kind of disruption, intensely focusing on automating repetitive admin tasks, and changing how this space is evolving.

Today, as top companies and governments challenge productivity and drive the need to digitize, more companies are starting to re-think the way they work. As such, the entire ecosystem is considering adopting alternative tactics.

In the finance space, businesses are shifting their direction towards expense management workflows that ensure efficient receipt handling, the possibility to streamline processing, and having more control over the end-to-end process.

If you’ve ever chosen a product for your team, you know how tricky this decision can be. Innovo42 Team

One of the first questions you may ask yourself now is why do I need an expense management tool?

Who’s responsible for doing it? And how can I properly measure the results?

Answering these fundamental questions is a must for expense-related work.

How can you tell if you’d benefit from an expense management solution?

Before we give you a glimpse into our own use cases, here are some reasons why your team should rethink the expense management workflow:

• You are using a manual system to manage expense where all the paperwork is scattered everywhere and no one has a good overview of the process.
• You are using an accounting system but expense claims are not seamlessly and automatically synced with an expense claim platform.
• Team members routinely make errors and spend a hefty amount of time on tedious tasks.

Driving Growth and Efficiency

How do you efficiently drive growth, efficiency and streamline your expense management workflow at the same time?

At Innovo42, not only do we build the kind of product that helps companies gain productivity and automation, but we’re also big users of our own product.

To benefit from a high level of accuracy and minimize the amount of time spent on manually submitting receipts, we use our very own expense management software (Innovo Xpense) which allows us to quickly take a picture of receipts using the smartphone app to process data instantly.

What’s amazing about our product is that expense claims are automatically generated within seconds so they can be verified and submitted on the spot.

That means doing zero manual work. Think no more inputting of data and, really, no more manual pasting of receipts in your bookkeeping log.

By using Innovo Xpense, we can focus on our core business. The time freed up can either be used to engage more with customers, mentor staff or spend with one’s family.

And this is something a lot of managers and employees would prefer rather than doing admin work. Rene Hess, Co-Founder

Another interesting aspect of our product lies in the fact that approvals can be conveniently done on the go, anytime and anywhere.

And last but not least, all expense claims are seamlessly logged into accounting or ERP systems without the need for any manual intervention.

While all of these steps are definitely not rocket science, we are proud to have built a product that brings convenience to ourselves and our customers.

Why? Because we know the pain of manual data entry and how tedious and full of errors the whole process can get. So why not shift our mentality and way of working?

We are proud to have built a product that brings convenience to ourselves and our customers. Innovo42 Team

On the tech vertical, our product blends Machine Learning with iterative learning to extract accurate data. We believe in technology that helps improve processes over time and take pride in using models that help us accurately process data.

Because we are firm believers of digitizing tasks that would otherwise take more time, we want to share our own experience of making use of the product and how it helps us on a daily basis.

In this guide, we’ll discuss what are the use cases used by Innovo42 to have a holistic expense management experience.

Value Propositions

Proposition #1

Maximize productivity and efficiency

As professionals working in the digital landscape, it’s important to find ways to become more efficient and meet our deadlines. This is why having an expense management workflow plan in place has saved our team precious time.

From the beginning, we can easily set up the user hierarchy to properly establish which team member will handle each step of the process.

This allows us to easily define users within the platform so roles can be properly distinguished from those who can submit expense claims to those who have the right to approve expenses for other users.

This essentially gives access and overview to team members to be on top of their game when submitting claims and approving expenses.

Proposition #2

Visibility and accessibility are a game-changer

Tech is transforming the finance industry, offering more insight into what is happening at any time in the process. And real-time visibility allows us to identify potential issues and correct them before they escalate.

For instance, our team has access to a dashboard which offers an expense management module. This provides insights into all expense claims made.

Visibility ensures that our team has the right data to know which actions to take at each step of the workflow. In our experience, staff who are at the helm of this work can make informed decisions based on data received from this centralized platform.

Similarly, our team performs analyses to optimize decisions, pinpoint a process breakdown and create a more effective expense repository.

Proposition #3

Reporting is key

We believe that insights play an important role in saving time and reducing errors.

Reporting is one of the most critical requirements for any business and many experts will emphasize the importance of leveraging analytics to gain insight and uncover hidden patterns related to processes, patterns, and trends.

At Innovo42, we gather data to gain insights into spending patterns to better manage, plan, and organize our workflows.

Proposition #4

Digitizing your expense claims process can be challenging but it’s worth it.

It all boils down to automation and tech.

We know first-hand that for a company to thrive, it’s not only needed to adopt new tools to make work more efficient, but one of the most important aspects is how employees adapt to change and what it’s needed to make the transition smoother.

At Innovo42, ever since we started operating, we wanted to create an environment of learning and encouraged our team to use tech to automate tasks and ultimately work smarter.

Through our very own product, we managed to learn the benefits of working with technology to perform expense claims.

Proposition #5

Quick integrations with other tools

We’re aware that making software easier to use is only half of the battle. Teams are increasingly looking at tools that work better together as well — so they don’t have to interrupt the overall flow.

That’s why Innovo Xpense has the option to connect with other tools so that it can quickly sync all expenses with accounting systems and create a well-rounded flow. This straightforward integration will ensure that expense claims are always up to date.

And this means that teams can move forward without any interruptions to their workflow.

Proposition #6

Maximizing GST Refunds

We all know that reclaiming GST expenses can be a source of hidden cash, but it also enables companies to stay in compliance with the government’s tax rules.

In our case, our aim is to streamline this process to be able to automatically extract GST information as well as digitally save copies of the receipts to facilitate the audit process if required.

So by having access to this feature, we are able to easily book and archive receipts correctly to have access to them anytime and make claims that would otherwise be missed.

Conclusion

At Innovo42, we strive to build a more sustainable expense management workflow.

We believe in the idea that through automation, we can fully utilize a product to reduce the time spent on manual work and minimize errors.

We’re passionate about developing a better way of working that puts user experience first.

And as we have tried this idea ourselves, we would like to help other companies optimize their time as well.

The main idea behind Innovo Xpense is to reduce the time spent doing mandatory admin work. By being able to just snap a receipt or forward a PDF invoice to an email address, the time for processing expenses is reduced considerably.

The integrated reporting capabilities allow analyzing expenses in order to keep a good grip on the cost.

Setting up Innovo Xpense is easy: simply subscribe, choose your preferred accounting system, add or import your users, define your accounts and you are ready.

Here are the steps below:

• Subscribe to the Innovo Team Plan

• You will receive an email to activate your account. From there, you can log into the admin console and complete the setup process.

• Next, connect to an accounting system. We currently have direct integration with Quickbooks and Xero. If you use MYOB, Innovo Xpense has a file-based export. For any other system, you can use the standard transaction export to upload transactions in your account system.

• Add the users of your company. You can import them or manually capture them.

• Once added, you can define who approves expenses.

• Map your expense categories to your accounts for quick integration.

We have a very agile approach so changes to the environment and enhancements are incorporated at a fast pace to ensure that specific needs are taken care of and that your expense management workflow is always on top of the game.

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