Transforming Business Expense Management in the Digital Era

Businesses have managed corporate expenses through paper, spreadsheets, and emails for years. Today, this approach no longer makes sense. Infact, manual expense management is a drain on businesses due to slow reimbursement process that consumes a lot of time. Therefore, finance leaders should consider moving to a cloud-based expense management software that streamlines workflow, enforce reimbursement policies and delivers accurate and up-to-date expense information.

Increased Pressure on Staff

Increased time-to-market pressures and productivity expectations are forcing workers to get more work done in less time. Employees can’t spend days in writing expense reports and managers don’t have time to review expense reports. Also, finance team doesn’t have time to manually analyze business expenses as expense volume grows constantly.

Highly Mobile Workforce

Spreadsheet-based expense management works when people were closely bound to the office. Today, employees have become highly mobile and they work remotely. So, sitting in the office and sharing paper receipts do not work for this millennial generation.

Dynamic Expense Management System

Employees should be reimbursed for travel, entertainment and other expenses they paid out-of-pocket. Expense management has become more challenging, there is an increase in both volume and variety of the expenses employees submit. In today’s dynamic business environment, expense codes change quickly as project timelines get compressed and reorganization can be done more often. Finance departments need more granular insight into growing expenses. They have to understand who is spending what and why? Ultimately, you should have a clear understanding of what’s going on with expense management.

So, what does the expense management should look like? What specific attributes should finance leaders look for in ad hoc spending while taking the hassle out of expense management workflows?

While there are many solutions, there are three attributes you should be particular about:

Cloud-based Solutions

Cloud-based expense report solutions offer various advantages over spreadsheet-based solutions. This solution will replace multiple spreadsheets with a single and centralized repository of expense-related data. Another reason is cloud-based solutions are mobile, meaning business managers and accounting department can log in from anywhere, anytime.

Rule-based Workflow

The SutiExpense solution allows the accounting department to build policies and processes right into the system. Instead of making the accounting department rely on spreadsheets manually to validate and evaluate claims, the system does this work automatically. The system alerts claimants if a particular category spending for a month exceeds a definite limit or if the expense code was entered incorrectly.

Expense report software will also generate alerts, reports, and dashboards that provide stakeholders with visibility into trends, and policies.

Intuitive and Configurable

Despite featuring comprehensive features, expense management solutions should be intuitive and user-friendly to use. Ideally, the expense report system should make it easier for the accounting department to modify policies, workflows, expense codes and other parameters.

Why is this important?

Accounting systems should realize the benefits of modernized expense management system to take advantage of technology:

Benefits to Users

Users will be able to easily submit expenses and corresponding receipts anytime, anywhere. Automatic alerts will be sent if they make a data entry error, submit an out-of-policy expense claim and make a duplicate claim. Most importantly, the automated workflow is another key feature that helps claimants get reimbursed quickly.

Benefits to Managers

Allow managers to simply approve or reject expense reports from their desktop, tablet, or phone whenever they find convenient. Also, track current spending by any parameter and modify expense policies when needed. This makes claims approval fast, easy, and convenient. Expense report software helps business managers better accomplish their objectives by minimizing the time their teams have to spend on expense reports.

Benefits to Accounts Department

Getting timely, accurate and completely documented claims alleviates the need to chase people for late submissions or spend time explaining policies to employees. With cloud-based expense report software system, decision-makers gain unprecedented visibility into what’s driving expenses and where they can deduct the costs. Validating expense claims and managing it all from a single interface make it much easier for accountants to integrate expenses into accounting systems.

Fortunately, expense report solutions empower accounting departments to eliminate fraud while validating every expense claim enterprise-wide. In this way, expense report solution would expedite the reimbursement process while making it easy for the users and accountants to walk through the entire process.