For a business to be successful, it’s imperative to streamline the expense management process and optimize corporate spend.
But in the meantime, it can be easy to slip up, making things more difficult for you and your finance team.
So how can you stop your corporate finances turning into a disaster?
Here are some of the mistakes to avoid when it comes to expense management for business and most importantly, how you can find a solution to them.
- Manually managing expenses
One of the major pitfalls of expense management is manually using a spreadsheet to organize every business expense.
It takes a lot of effort to manually track, upload and process receipts and invoices. Not only is it time-consuming, but it’s more likely to involve human error.
Using a spreadsheet, or any form of manually recording expenses data, makes it near impossible to approve transactions beforehand, set budgets for each department, or understand if employees are over-spending.
Without an automated expense management system, receipts will need to be manually tracked, matched to the right corporate card, and then each individual employee will need to be reimbursed for their expenses.
Add on another layer of chasing or losing receipts, and your finance team are left with a mess.
However, using the best expense management software allows a clear picture of overall business spend, giving you visibility and control from one single platform.
You and your finance team can save hours of time and manual work, by categorizing and recording your expenses easily through expense management software.
- Every team member has a business credit card
The fastest way to lose track of your company’s expenses is to give every single employee a physical, corporate credit card.
Opting for a virtual credit card instead — and for specific departments or employees — can eliminate the risk of losing a physical card, or being more susceptible to scams or fraud.
What’s more, a virtual credit card can be linked to your expense management software, to provide actionable insights for every payment, whatever the type of transaction.
Spotted an area of your business which is considerably overspending each month?
With a virtual credit card, this can be avoided, as they give you the ability to set spending limits and make it easier to enforce expense policies.
- Not making the most of expense management software
Introducing expert expense management software can bring many benefits to your business, and is the easiest way to improve processes and optimize spending in many ways.
Firstly, the right expense management system can integrate smoothly with your accounting software. With seamless systems in place, it can improve the accuracy of reporting expenses, as well as save plenty of time.
Online expense software can also provide you and your finance team with reliable real-time data, allowing you to accurately analyze corporate spend. From here, companies can determine future budgets and establish more effective ways to regulate expenses, on a well-informed basis.
Arguably, the best advantage of expense management software, is the fact it can reduce overall costs. This means not only the cost of the processing expenses, but also a simpler way to optimize spend.
An expert platform will provide payment insights which can reveal where your company is spending on duplicate services, and even suggest cheaper alternatives, to make sure your business isn’t overspending unnecessarily.
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Expense management doesn’t need to be complicated, and any issues can be avoided with a simple solution — expense management software. With the right software and tools, you can minimize mistakes made by human error and manual work, streamline your expense process with virtual credit cards, and align your spend management with your accounting software.
