Top 4 expense management challenges impacting your business

It’s an all-too-common scenario in the digital age: employees go about their work, collecting receipts for their out-of-pocket expenses. Periodically, they fill out and submit a paper-based expense form, attaching the receipts. They even have to print out digital receipts to do this!

Then someone in the accounts department has to laboriously re-enter the details into a financial system for verification and processing.

Think about the work hours these processes require over a year—not to mention the potential for errors in paper forms or when keying in data.

The solution: a good digital expense management system doesn’t just handle the processing. It automates the lifecycle to be simpler and more efficient. Leveraging artificial intelligence, employees can easily capture receipts to automate expense classification and can track the status of claims, all via an app on their mobile devices.

No data-entry duplication, no wasted work hours and far fewer errors.

The ‘management’ side of expense management is often a highly manual exercise too. A paper-based process often requires one or more managers to check and approve an expense claim. That adds to managers’ workloads and results in delays, with claims sometimes buried at the bottom of in-trays.

Perhaps you want to introduce different approval processes based on the department, employee, and the amount and type of expenses. That’s difficult or even impossible with manual processes and some digital systems.

An enterprise expense management system that offers business process automation will streamline complex approval workflows—including escalating approvals to executives for expenses over a certain amount. This saves time for everyone from employees to managers and finance teams.

Slow-moving, error-prone manual processes have another big problem: they make it difficult and labour-intensive to get an accurate read of the organisation’s expenses. And even then, it’s a periodic and historic view.

A fully digital system will make it much quicker and easier to access that data. But beware: they don’t all offer the sophisticated reporting you may need. An expense management system that’s fully integrated with your enterprise financial system will not only give you a real-time view of expenses, but you’ll also have the power to identify trends early and drill down into problem areas.

Do you need to ensure your financials are fully compliant with regulatory and auditing requirements? Relying on humans to enforce compliance with expenditure processes is fraught with difficulties. It relies on everyone along the approval chain following set policies.

But not all digital systems offer the power and flexibility needed to enforce compliance. For that you need an expense management system that’s integrated with your enterprise financial system. Such a system not only includes embedded workflow capabilities and controls, but also offers built-in audit trails.

From gaining real-time visibility of expenditure to enforcing workflows and compliance, an integrated expense management system will transform how your organisation manages expenditure.

Capturing receipts and approving and processing claims will be a breeze, enabling your employees and the finance team to focus on higher-value tasks.

Discover More:

Are manual processes holding your finance team back?

Three misconceptions about transitioning to TechnologyOne SaaS

TechnologyOne customers on why they use Software as a Service