Take Control Of Business Expenses With Expense Management

Business expenses can quickly spiral out of control if not tracked properly and managed. From recurring monthly bills to one-time purchases, it’s quite critical to have visibility and control over where your money is going. Implementing an expense management process allows you to rein in spending, enforce policies, and drive better investments. 

1. Keep Your Spending Organized with Budgets and Expense Policies

• The first step is gathering all your expenses together and setting budgets. Make a comprehensive list of recurring and one-time expenses like rent, payrolls, office supplies, etc. Organize them into categories like fixed vs. variable or required vs. discretionary to identify patterns and priorities. 

• Once you start organizing your spending, you may notice you spend way more on travel and software subscriptions than expected. Or even that certain departments overspend their historical budgets every quarter. Defining budgets for categories provides constraints and reinforces expectations around spending. 

• Next, establish clear company expense policies aligned with financial goals and constraints. Set per diem rates for employees and teams to control the costs. Require pre-approval from managers for expenses over certain limits to prevent any surprise spending. 

• You can also document all your policies thoroughly in an employee handbook to avoid confusion down the road when an expense is denied for not following the rules. Defined budgets and policies act as guardrails to keep spending aligned with company objectives and resources. 

2. Issue Corporate Cards for Better Spend Control 

• Providing employees with corporate credit cards for simplified spending tracking across the company. Integrated apps can automatically extract transaction data from corporate card statements and receipts. Expenses get categorized, matched to invoices, and allocated to the right departments or projects. Built-in approval workflows route higher-value expenses to managers for review while letting minor purchases pass through easily. 

• Alerts and reminders ensure that spending policies are enforced consistently across all employees and cards. For example, denying reimbursement for a flight upgrade beyond the company limit. Or flagging a monthly software subscription renewal that exceeds the allowed budget. 

• Corporate cards with integrated automation provide oversight and control while also streamlining expense compliance. Employees don’t have to front expenses or keep submitting reports manually. And managers have full visibility over spending. 

3. Make Expense Claims Management Painless

• Submitting and managing employee expense claims and reimbursements should be quick and painless. Automated tools can simplify the process considerably over manual methods. 

• Employees can easily capture receipts via mobile and input expense details on the go. Default expense categories and merchant descriptions make data entry a breeze. Direct integration with corporate cards means transaction details get auto-populated. 

• Configurable approval process routes employee expense claims to managers on policy rules. Alerts let approvers review pending submissions to prevent bottlenecks. 

• Implement an incentive program to motivate employee engagement with the new automated expense process. For example, reward teams that stay under their budgets for the quarter. Or celebrate an individual who submits expenses with perfect compliance for six months straight. 

• With the right tools and incentives, even extensive business expense reporting becomes simple, automated, and frictionless. 

4. Accelerate Accounting of Expenses With Automation

• Managing expenses with spreadsheets or paper receipts makes accounting reconciliation extremely painful. But automating expense management provides immense benefits come month-end close. 

• Transaction-level expense data integrated with corporate cards and accounting systems accelerates the reconciliation process. Built-in accounting rules ensure automatic compliance with reporting standards. 

• Spend pattern analysis yields valuable insights to optimize budgets further. Negotiate contracts with vendors based on actual utilization rather than estimates. Adjust policies that are too restrictive or lenient based on real employee expense habits. Automated accounting reconciliation and reporting reinforce oversight over costs.  

What Are You Waiting For? 

Regain visibility control over business expenses is critical for companies of all sizes looking to optimize costs and operate efficiently. Integrated expense management tools can provide this control while also simplifying compliance for employees at scale. 

A good expense management system offers you a simplified way of tracking employee spending with corporate cards. This allows you to keep spending aligned to budgets with configurable policies. Automate your expense claims for frictionless processing and gain insights to optimize budgets further. This helps you to accelerate your accounting reconciliation cycles. 

The time for robust expense control is now. Don’t let spending remain a black box full of surprises. Implement automated expense management across your organization to rein in costs and operate more profitably.