If you own a small business, you understand the pain that expenses bring every day. This makes any expense management solution a godsend to businesses looking to simplify their reports, including their entire process. As business owners look to trim their costs, accounting for every dollar counts.

Proper expense management can mean the difference between profit and loss. It can spell what goes to your bottom line and what goes to your operations cost. Then again, how does an expense management system work? Here’s everything you need to know about these systems that will help streamline your operations.

What is an Expense Management System?

To understand what an expense management system is and how it works, we need to define what counts as an EMS. Expense management systems are software that record, track, approve, pay, process, and audit any business-related expenses. The idea sounds simple, but it has its own intricacies.

In many situations, a company must control how its employees and stakeholders spend. The money spent should be in line with the expense policy set forth by the company. Utilising the right system that provides a streamline processing of your business expenses, you prevent overspending while empowering your workers and managers to use company money as needed.

With any business management plan, you want to control your company expenses while increasing your return on investment (ROI). Having any idea about your cash flow and spending can help with your decision-making. You need to know if you’re spending too much or if any fraudulent expenses are happening in your organization.

Expense management systems are valuable within teams that are looking to optimize their process. By adding the system within the flow of internal procedures and expense reporting, the organization can make frame every expense within the company.

Expense Management System Features You Need To Look For

Expense management systems need to have several must-have features for them to truly work for almost any business. Among many things, the software needs to be an all-in-one system that acts as a suite of various payment, tracking, and auditing features. These include:

• Expense tracking
• Receipt recording
• Centralized database with multiple access layers
• Maximum spending
• Adding/Editing spending limits
• Corporate credit card integration
• Expense alerts and notification
• Expense approval and auditing
• Policy violation checks
• Reimbursement scheduling

As you can see, these features are numerous, but not every system needs to have everything. There are some crucial features that you want for your expense system. Depending on your business, you want a combination of these features that help ease expense tracking, recording, and auditing.

Why You Need To Get An Expense Management Software

There are many reasons you should use an expense management system for your business. Whether you’re a small startup or a big company with hundreds of employees, managing expenses is an expensive endeavor. Manual expense report creation is time-consuming, inefficient, expensive, and lacks the safeguards you need to keep your business running. 

A basic expense report, for example, consumes around 20 minutes to fill up and the cost of processing can rack up to a little less than $60. If there are corrections, it takes almost as long and as expensive to process the same document. There’s also the problem of receiving the approvals for the reimbursement.

As you can see, companies that do it manually have less insight into the spending habits of their workers. This, coupled with the enormous potential for fraudulent expenses, can cut into your business’s bottom line. 

With an expense management system, you minimize not only the upfront cost but also the time that these reports have. You also alleviate fears of fraud and the risks associated with manual expense management. However, while the chances of fraud can be reduced drastically, it could still happen. Regardless of whether it comes from employees or customers, the risk is always there. Should this happen, try and track down the individual as soon as you can (or hire Bond Rees tracing agents if you are unable to find them yourself) and bring them to justice. You will feel better for doing so and even more at peace when you have the necessary pieces of technology at your disposal in the first place. 

Finding The Right Expense Manager System

Expense management systems need some key features to make them useful within an organization. Getting to pick and choose features is a must. It needs to work within your specific team, rather than provide cookie-cutter solutions.

For starters, you want your system to have a way to track the expenses of your employees. It needs to have a way to collate all employee receipts, as well as create a digital record of every purchase event. In these situations, a card-based system should make tracking easier.

Depending on your system, you can have an expense manager that simply audits your spending every step of the way. There are also more sophisticated systems that provide credit card and non-card payment options through an app. This eliminates any cash-related expense in the system, which further cuts down the risk of fraud.

You also want a system that documents spending limits and contains the expense policies of the company. An expense system that can pay any invoice electronically is a fantastic investment. For foreign companies, you would want the system to handle expense reconciliation, as well as multiple options for foreign currency payments.

Advantages of Expense Management Systems

There are several advantages to using the right expense management system for your business. With the time-consuming manual process out of the window, a more automated system should help with a few vital points.

1. Easy Expense Tracking

Expense reporting should not rely on the prerogative of the employee. You want a system that’s not only device-agnostic but cuts off any potential expense sources that are impossible to track. Systems that include apps and credit card systems can limit where they can be used and for what purpose.

2. Prevents Delays In Expense Recording

Instead of waiting for your employees to submit their reimbursement requests and having people sign off, you can have a system that tracks the process through paperless means. With the right authorization, companies can have expenses recorded and signed off without needing five signatures to do so.

3. Improves Policy Compliance 

Policy compliance is a key advantage of expense management systems. Beyond tracking and recording expenses, the system should know what expenses are allowed and disallowed. Such automation can come from software that can categorize every type of expense performed.

4. Record Traceability

With an expense management system, companies will have a digital record of each and every expense done. Whatever action happens within the bounds of the system, the company can trace it back with whom, where, and for how much. Such a process helps keep expenses ready for eventual accounting.

5. Expense Analytics and Visualization

Analytics can give you the right figures and trends within your expenses. A management system that visualizes your company spending can give you insights on where to cut costs and where to improve your spending management.

The Bottom Line

Missing out on critical business expenses and fraudulent purchases can be a nightmare. These can be detrimental to your business growth, as well as a waste of time and money.

Knowing how expense management systems work can give you a good idea of where to start. It’s not a question if you need one or not, but rather where can you find the right system for you. Start looking today.

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© Ruchi Verma

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