What is automated Expense Management?
In a nutshell, Expense Management automatization is the digital tracking of employee spending. An automated solution allows companies to track what employees are spending and where they are spending. Automation also gives managers better control of their budgets and visibility on employee spending.
Traditionally, expense management has been done manually through a submissions and approvals process managed via spreadsheets or email. It is typically a time consuming and tedious process, open to human error and expense fraud.
An expense management solution can simplify the process and give a company greater control over the spending habits of their employees, allowing them to easily identify irresponsible spending and quickly make decisions on cost-cutting.
Main Benefits of Automating Expense Management
- Cut Costs
Many companies worry about the expenses and effort related to setting up and maintaining an Expense Management solution. Qashio is a cost efficient solution designed to save money, time and effort when compared to your current manual process.
Companies can instantly limit the number of human resources needed to process and manage company expenses. The solution can be easily implemented by your Finance team with support available if needed.
Integrating your expense management system to your ERP or accounting software can further save the costs associated with manually populating the same information.
- Get Visibility
Expense Management softwares can be an important tool for decision making in companies. Auto-generated reports can provide the insights needed to make informed business decisions on improvements to policies and cost-cutting opportunities.
Having clear visibility on where funds are being spent can help companies eliminate inefficiencies and identify opportunities to consolidate spending and negotiate better terms with suppliers. Better visibility on spending also leads to more accountability for managers, departments and employees to manage their expenditure.
Having visibility on spend will also allow companies to identify misuse of funds or irresponsible spending and significantly reduce the risk of fraud.
- Manage Risk and Fraud
One of the most crucial aspects of automating expense management is the prevention of fraud and reduction of risk. Current practices rely heavily on the integrity of employees to act responsibly with company funds and on suppliers to act fairly when charging companies.
Through automation of this process, companies can set restrictions to proactively prevent fraud or misuse. The removal of manual reporting and reconciliation, eliminates the risk of falsified information and allows easy identification of any irregular transactions or vendors overcharging.
- Ease of Auditing and Compliance
Automating your expense reporting can make compliance and auditing processes a whole lot easier. You can easily set rules to ensure you are compliant with tax rules and regulations.
Having all your spending data captured and reconciled automatically makes the auditing process much faster and as a result much less time consuming and costly.
- Ensuring Policy Compliance and Responsible Spending
For growing companies, ensuring compliance with company spending policies can be an unnecessary headache and time drain for both employees and finance and HR departments.
Vague or unclear policies can be a minefield for employees who may inadvertently spend outside of policy and be subjected to an embarrassing and demotivating investigation process.
Qashio allows you to set automated approval workflows to ensure employees are consistently compliant with the spending policy and that any outside of policy or budget spending is pre-approved and all approvals are tracked and recorded. This transparency gives peace of mind to both company and employees and improves the speed of communication.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how Expense Management automation can benefit your business, contact us for a demo!