8 ways expense management software can help SMBs grow | Navisteps
Managing expenses and keeping a handle on what is being spent can be a nightmare for business owners, employees and finance teams. In addition to the repetitive and time-consuming data entry, receipt organisation alone is sufficient to make anyone crazy. As a business grows from small to medium-sized, the task gets more difficult — and you’re going to need some help.
This is where expense management software comes in handy.
What is Expense Management Software?
An expense management software allows businesses to “process, pay, and audit employee-initiated expenses. The software includes capabilities for employees to input expenses for approval through a browser or mobile application. Expense management software simplifies and automates a business’ expense entry, streamlines review, eliminates paper trail, and reduces administrative effort. Expense management software allows administrators to have full visibility of and track employee use of business financial resources. Expense management software analyses overall expenses, identifies cost-saving opportunities, and controls excessive spending.” (Source: g2)
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Here are 8 ways expense management software can enable your business to grow:
1. Ease management and tracking of paper receipts
Most expense management software is cloud-based, accessible via any device.
For employees, this means that you can file your expense claims on-the-go, the instant you spend the money. With machine learning technology like optical character recognition (OCR) built into expense management software, tracking your expenses is as easy as taking a photo of your receipts and having your expense data automatically captured and populated for you. No more shoebox full of paper receipts, or dealing with faded receipts or misplacement of critical receipts.
For finance teams/accounting professionals, no more countless hours of unproductive data entry, receipt chasing, and murky, outdated views of client spending records.
2. Reduce data errors that lead to a mismatch of payments
Ever heard of the “Telephone Game”? For those of you who haven’t, the gameplay goes like this: A message is given to the first person in a line of people and then they are instructed to pass the message on by whispering it in the ear of the next person in line. The message goes from person to person until it reaches the end of the line, and that person announces the message to the group. In most cases, the message that is announced to the group is significantly different from the message that was originally given to the first person in the line.
Just like the “Telephone Game”, businesses run the risk of data errors when employees manually enter data and it is being transferred and communicated across departments. As your business grows and the volume of expenses increases, the risk of data errors increases as more information gets keyed into the systems every day.
By using expense management software, you can automate expense claims and filing of expense reports such that you can reduce data errors and prevent your business from overpaying or underpaying employees.
4. Shorten approval workflow
By using expense management software, information is updated in real-time and employees across the entire organisation can work efficiently to manage expenses within the company together.
For example, managers can have visibility on the expenses claims submitted in real-time, receive notifications and approve them immediately once they see that it does not violate any company policies. This removes the need for employees to attach files, write approval emails, send them over to approving managers and then wait for an approval reply. The whole process is streamlined throughout different departments and management levels and you can save up to days or weeks of going back-and-forth within your company.
With the time saved, employees can then focus their time and efforts on other essential tasks to boost productivity and business growth.
7. Compliance with tax regulations
The filing of tax returns is compulsory for every business, no matter which country you are operating in. To ensure that you can submit records when asked for and that they are compliant with accounting standards, good record-keeping practices should be adopted and expense management software can be a tool to help you with that.
Growing your business
Navisteps is a cloud-based expense management solution for businesses to control, track and manage spend efficiently. Automated receipt tracking, smart spending policies, multi-level criteria based approvals, complete spend analytics and accounting integrations — we take care of your pre accounting processes so you can focus on business.
The solution also integrates business travel management so that you can book, manage and control your travel with ease while having your expense reports automatically created for you.
If you are interested to streamline and automate your company’s expense management process, sign up for a free 30-day trial here or speak to us to find out more.
Originally published at https://www.navisteps.com.
