Nearly one-third of the companies still use manual methods like using paper receipts and spreadsheets to manage business expenses, according to an expense management survey. It comes as a shocker considering the scope of mistakes and errors that potentially occur during data entry and expense validation. The report further disclosed that 69% of the companies expect that a manual approach could lead to increased fraud. Given the challenges that businesses could face by continuing to follow traditional methods of expense management, it is time to move their expense management online. Yet a significant majority consider digital expense management expensive and an operational overhead. However, that isn’t the case.
In this article, we will look at the top tips and best practices to follow to maximize the benefits of expense management online.
Top 10 tips to follow to streamline expense management online
- Ensure seamless onboarding: Shifting expense management online is a cultural change. You are likely to meet with resistance from employees for the same. However, you can gain their acceptance by offering a seamless onboarding process. If they realize how easy it is to use the solution, they will adapt to it faster. You can provide training materials, guides, and support to ensure a smooth transition from manual processes.
- Communicate advantages clearly: All the stakeholders involved in taking care of business expenses including employees must get an in-depth walk-through of expense management online. Emphasizing the time-saving functionalities, convenience features and simplification of expense reporting will further help their acceptance.
- Integrate solution with existing tools: One essential aspect of expense management online is frictionless integration with other solutions like accounting software, corporate cards, and payroll systems. It avoids delay and data entry errors during data transfer between departments.
- Define clear expense policies: Expense management software gives you controls to keep your expenses from overruling budgets and avoid fraud. For this, however, you must define a clear corporate expense policy outlining regulations around spending limits, expense categories, and documentation requirements.
- Automate compliance management: Utilize the automation functionalities of expense management software to enforce expense policy consistently. You can do that by configuring automatic alerts to be triggered whenever employees violate policy guidelines.
- Audit-proof record keeping: Moving expense management online gives you access to a centralized repository of all expense details including receipts, claim reports, and approval status. With this, you can facilitate a complete audit trail for regulatory compliance purposes on the go.
- Automate approval workflows: One major bottleneck of manual expense management processes comes at the approval stage. But with expense management online, you can automate approval workflow using rules-based scenarios. It expedites reimbursements and reduces manual tasks for stakeholders.
- Access real-time data and insights: Expense management software gives you access to a real-time view of your expense activities. You can use the data analytics and reporting capabilities to study spending patterns and cost-saving opportunities while identifying leakages to optimize budgeting.
- Use mobile app for convenience: Most expense management software allows you to access reports and spend data through mobile devices so that leaders are always in touch with their finances. Even employees can use mobile apps to submit claims reports and get approvals for key corporate transactions on the go.
- Seek user feedback and suggestions: The purpose of using expense management online is to simplify the end-to-end processes for all the stakeholders involved. To ensure it is doing the job, you must go back to employees, and team leaders about their experience with the digital expense management system. You can use the feedback to fix the problem areas to maximize its advantages.
Scale your expense management online with Zaggle EMS
Most companies struggle with adopting expense management software because they can’t find a solution that can be modified to suit their business processes. That is why we recommend Zaggle EMS. It is an all-in-one expense management system that is designed for SMEs so that they can customize the platform by configuring rules and workflows. It comes with multiple features to keep your expenses under control. Some of them are,
- Easy enforcement of expense policies via controls & alerts
- Multiple approval workflows for versatile usage
- Access to automatically generated reports for better insights
- Reminders and alerts to avoid fraud and budget overruns
- Seamless integration with business tools
Learn more about Zaggle EMS here.
