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Expense Management Software Buyer's Guide
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Tracking and managing expenses was a tiresome process for organizations. All the expenses were handled based on paper receipts, and there were no backups. If you lost some paper bills, you lost the information or cash. All this has now changed with expense management software to handle various financial functions.
» What is Expense Management Software?
Expense management software helps your organization in multiple ways, especially by simplifying and automating a business expense entry, eliminates the paper trail, streamlines review, and reduces administrative effort. The use of high-quality expense tracking systems has become necessary for all sizes of businesses and makes it easy to stay on top of your expenses.
» What are the Features of Expense Management Software?
Businesses are making use of expense management software to process, pay, and audit employee-initiated expenses. The expense management system enables your employees to input expenses for approval through both browsers and mobile applications. The software analyzes your business overall expenses, controls excessive spending, and cost-saving opportunities.
It should allow you to have full visibility of and track employee use of business financial resources. Your expense management software should have full features that offer functionality such as invoicing and inventory. The basic features and competencies each expense management system should have are:
› Expense Records
This feature facilitates you to stay on top of your resources, even from your mobile or tablets. It tracks and follows expenses and stores them in robust databases with in-built search filters.
› Invoice Management
Your software should have this feature to strengthen customer and external partner relationships, as well as helps companies to use their resources more appropriately. This way, they can take hold of early payment discounts, strengthen compliance, reduce risks, and so on.
› Merging Expenses
Expense tracking software merges your expenses, categorizes them, and attaches them to any report, helping you to eliminate the risk of double entries and expense errors.
› Receipt Management
The software saves all the important details without the need to import the data manually, when the receipts are automated, as well as allows customization as you need.
› Approval Process Control
Your software should allow multiple users and they are secured with assigned role permissions and tasks. Everything you access is highly controlled and only the admin can approve the data being inserted in the system.
› Integration
The software you have chosen should integrate commonly with other systems such as time tracking software, payroll software, travel management, workforce management software, and accounting software.
› Mobile App
Look for the software that facilitates business travel and expense management. The automated app should include voice recognition, mileage tracking, and expense detection features to help you save time and increase efficiency.
» What are the Benefits of Expense Management Software?
One of the best things about the Expense management tools is, it can be used for a variety of programs too. The software tracks expenses allowing users to report and forecast future expenses and so some customization. Some of the most distinctive benefits organizations experience from using expense management software:
› Efficient Tracking of Travel Expenses
The expense management software allows your organization to simplify tracking and reimbursement of travel expenses. Especially, the software benefits a lot for organizations with a high number of employees who frequently travel.
› Streamlines Expense Management
The more your employees travel, the more they spend on their travel and business arrangements. Employees expect to be reimbursed as soon as possible, while employers need to ensure that the expenses comply with their companies policies and are approved before being processed. This process is simplified with the expense management software.
› Reduces Processing Errors
While submitting or processing expense reports manually, it is possible for errors. This is where exactly expense tracking tools come conveniently for this challenge, making your employee’s job easy.
› Tax Risk Mitigation
The software is critical for maintaining data accuracy and allows no mistake. It helps you in differentiating legitimate and illegitimate expenses and organizes them in categories, and reports on every expense that are claimed accordingly.
› Flexible Risk Responses and Fraud Reduction
Without any requirement for installing additional infrastructure, the software can recover fast on implementation cost.
› Compliance With Regulations
Being compliant with internal and external regulations is the top priority for any company, regardless of your industry. The expense management software ensures they track legislative changes automatically and update system data to reflect this.
› Reliable Expense Management
With the expense management software, rules are rules. Employees will in advance know what they have to ask for and what not to. The software enables automated approval and payoff, motivating requesters and confirmers to act fast.
» What is the Cost of Expense Management Software?
Pricing details are considered vital for any business when they determine to buy a software product. It is important to remember not to get saddled with long-term licensing and subscribe to long-term contracts. It is recommended to ask your software provider about exit policies that enable you to move on to other software if you feel the services offered by the current software are not satisfying.
The best expense management software meets compliance and security requirements. So, do a little research on the internet to find out and shortlist a few software that meets your requirements. You should also get to know how the software provider protects your sensitive data and do they meet any security needs of your specific industry.
The price of the software ranges from the basic tool suites to expensive and accurate programs. Usually, the price starts from $4.99/month or $5/user/month. The best way is to sign up for at least a couple of free trials or request for a demo or basic unpaid plans from the top expense management software providers. This opportunity allows you to test the important elements and get a good comparison of the software.
» Conclusion
The expense tracking software is powerful and simple that tracks business expenses incredibly easily. With a glance, you will get to know what you are spending and how profitable you are. Any of these software products would be a good choice for your business depending on your needs. However, it is important to choose a service that is affordable, user-friendly, and that scales as your business grows. Ultimately, you need not have to reconsider your decision down the road.