No enterprise can forecast cash flow and make realistic budgets without managing different categories of expenses efficiently. An enterprise can manage expenses efficiently only by streamlining a slew of interrelated activities – expense tracking, expense reimbursements, expense payments, expense auditing, and expense reporting.
Expense report software helps companies streamline complex processes like expense management by providing useful features. The features and tech tools provided by the software help your organization save time and cost by automating a crucial financial process end-to-end.
The expense management software creates opportunities for your company to switch from paper-based expense reports to digital expense reports. Employees can use the software to generate and submit digital expense reports.
The finance team can use the same software to manage employee-initiated expenses efficiently. The software’s built-in features will help them reduce the time and effort required to track, review, process, and audit employee-initiated expenses.
Here are some key features and benefits of expense report software that help your business streamline the expense management process.
10 Important Features and Benefits of Expense Report Software
1. Enhanced Process Efficiency and Accuracy
In the age of Industry 4.0, your company must not manage expenses manually. An expense report solution helps your organization automate the process end-to-end. The software will help your employees save the time and effort required to generate expense reports.
At the same time, your finance team can use the software to overcome major shortcomings of manual expense management like data entry errors, receipt management, and expense fraud detection. The software will enable them to manage additional expense claims in a short amount of time.
2. Policy Compliance
A well-crafted expense policy helps your company control costs. Employees working from home and traveling for business can refer to the policies to understand and avoid non-reimbursable expenses. But you can control costs only by communicating and enforcing expense policies effectively.
The expense management software allows you to implement granular policies. Employees can use the software to access and understand relevant rules and guidelines. Also, the software will flag out-of-policy expenses when they generate expense reports.
3. Expense Report Digitalization
As noted earlier, the expense report solution helps your business go paperless. Your employees can use the software to generate and submit digital expense reports. Further, they can access the software on mobile devices to generate automated expense reports by scanning receipts, invoices, and bills.
The automated expense reports help employees claim only in-policy expenses and eliminate data entry errors. At the same time, your finance team can review and process digital expense reports faster than paper-based expense reports.
4. Faster Expense Reimbursements
Remote and offsite employees these days incur a variety of expenses to perform professional responsibilities efficiently. Likewise, employees traveling for work spend money on essential business travel products and ancillary expenses.
They experience stress when your finance team needs more time to process expense claims. The expense report software enables your finance team to track employee-initiated expenses in real time. Also, the new-age tech solutions accelerate reimbursements by sending automated notifications to approvers.
5. Real-Time Spend Visibility
Expense management solutions feature intuitive dashboards. Your finance team can use the dashboard to differentiate between processed and pending expense claims. The real-time expense tracking will help them boost employee experience by accelerating expense reimbursements.
At the same time, decision-makers can use the dashboard to get real-time spend visibility. The spend visibility will help them make crucial finance decisions, forecast cash flow, and make budgets. You can further make financial planning by dividing expenses into relevant categories.
6. Custom Report Generation
The expense report software facilitates expense data analysis by supporting expense custom report generation and scheduling. You can use the dashboard to generate reports based on real-time expense data using various metrics and parameters.
You review and analyze employee-initiated expenses by generating reports using parameters like department, category, and purpose. Also, you can generate custom reports to detect expense policy violations, overspending, and unnecessary expenses.
7. Regular Expense Audits
Expense audits are an integral part of expense management. Your company must audit expenses regularly to know if expenses incurred by employees align with organizational policies. Also, expense audit results help you assess the efficiency and accuracy of expense reporting and tracking activities.
The expense report software helps you conduct expense audits effortlessly by creating digital audit trials. In addition to storing invoices in digital format, it captures the remarks made by approvers while reviewing expense claims. Hence, it becomes easier for you to conduct expense audits without putting in extra time and effort.
8. Expense Fraud Prevention
While submitting expense reports, employees execute expense fraud in several ways – inflating expense amounts, submitting false invoices, and claiming personal expenses. The expense management software minimizes expense fraud by generating expense reports using data captured from scanned invoices.
Also, new-age expense report tools detect expense fraud using intelligence technologies. They send automated notifications after detecting expense fraud. The feature helps your company prevent revenue leaks caused due to expense report fraud.
9. Expense Data Analysis
Expense data management and analysis is one of the major benefits of new-age expense report software. The software stores employees’ expense data in a centralized location. Also, it uses advanced analytics to analyze the data automatically.
The software gains and shares a variety of actionable data by analyzing real-time expense data regularly. You can use data-driven insights to control expenses and refine expense policies by making informed financial decisions.
10. Options to Integrate and Scale
Your company can scale cloud-based expense report software on demand. The scalability makes it easier for you to manage a surge in expense claims submitted by employees. At the same time, you can boost financial decision-making by integrating the expense management software with accounting, payroll, human resource management, and travel management solutions.
Conclusion
Expense report software helps your company streamline a complex financial process by featuring useful features and tech tools. However, you should prioritize expense management software that provides robust features and leverages cutting-edge technologies.
The amalgamation of features and technologies is essential to make expense management a data-driven business process. In addition to automating various expense management activities, the expense reporting software will create opportunities for your business to control costs by making informed financial decisions.