Expense Management; Definition, Types & Tips

expense management definition

This is particularly useful for finance teams, since they can match the expense claims to the receipts digitally instead of digging through an assortment of paper receipts. This is also ideal for internal and external audits, since accountants can easily conduct pre-accounting and track every reimbursed expense back to its source. Most small businesses, startups, and mid-market companies resort to spreadsheets, paper forms, and other makeshift manual methods for expense reporting. Initially, this can be a good system for companies with a low headcount or for companies that don’t deal with many transactions yet. But as a business scales in terms of employees, locations, or customers, it has to deal with a lot of changes in its processes. Keeping track of business expenses can be an exhausting task both for business travellers and finance teams, but more than that, it is unnecessary.

However, it plays a vital role in the bottom line of the company, ultimately saving time and giving you better control over expenses incurred during daily operations. Combining expense report data with ERP data also leads to a richer analysis across all spend categories, as well as by region, brand or other business segment. It can be difficult to find these issues with manual systems, particularly for a company with a growing team of field workers. Missing information, approval of spending without a thorough review and slow approvals are all common issues. This not only wastes employees’ time but also leaves employees wondering where their expense checks are (often as they’re already racking up new expenses for the next closing period).

What Is an Expense?

Pluto allows you to issue your employees unlimited corporate cards with spend control. If you have daily allowances, weekly budgets, or travel expenses, you can get better control over your employee spending by setting law firm bookkeeping custom limits on their corporate credit cards. If you want to take the pain out of expense management, you can adopt an innovative way of managing your expenses using any free templates provided by Formplus here.

  • This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.
  • This is so because reimbursement of an expense claim is dependent on the provision of an expense claim or report.
  • To be reimbursed for these expenses, the employees must report them, including details and receipts, and get the reports approved by their line managers and finance teams.
  • After you have factored in all your income sources and fixed and variable costs, you can see what you have available for one-time purchases.
  • When developing the right policies and approach, it can help to know some best practices that have proven to work for other organizations.
  • This makes it easy for Finance teams to audit expense reports before processing reimbursements.

Keep all of your receipts and expenses organized in one straightforward system, so you can add, check, and file anytime you need. Industries can change quickly, and it’s easy for old expenses and practices to become obsolete. Expense tracking gives you an easy way to record and understand all of your spendings and review it in a timely manner.

What does “Going Paperless” mean?

These reimbursement receipts are accessible to the administrators through a streamlined process to approve the claims while checking for any corporate policy violations. In addition, the software assists organizations in keeping track of their employee’s corporate expenses. In traditional approaches to expense reporting, even if the reports and receipts are submitted promptly, it takes time to review and approve them. With an expense management app, you can create automated approval workflows to reduce manual intervention and shorten the approval process.

Everyone in the office should have a clear and concise idea of how to manage expenses. With the right tools, every employee can contribute to the accounting flow. Mobile apps empower employees and give them access to company funds while emphasizing transparency and security.

Bleisure Travel and Workations: How to Capitalize on the Modern Business Traveler

For one, it eliminates the need for accounting staff to upload or manually enter expense report data, saving time and reducing the risk of errors. Once approved, expenses are then automatically scheduled for payment, resulting in faster employee reimbursement. This system https://www.digitalconnectmag.com/a-deep-dive-into-law-firm-bookkeeping/ automates the recording, tracking, approval and payment of reimbursable expenses incurred by employees. Expense management software aligns with the company’s expense management policy to ensure the business doesn’t overspend on approved (or unapproved) expenses.

  • Using custom workflows, the software also simplifies the expense approval process by automatically routing those tasks to the right people.
  • With its many variables and dependencies, business finance management can be tricky and painful for the Finance team and the entire company.
  • It also eliminates the need for constant back and forths between stakeholders to ensure timely expense report submissions, approvals, and employee expense reimbursements.
  • The first step is making sure that all stakeholders are both aware and aligned with the current policies.
  • With the right spend management software, businesses get complete control over how and where their money is being spent.
  • Concur can capture spending from multiple sources, including OCR, and prepare them for submission.
Translate »
9740740030
Open chat
1
Need Help?
Chat with us
Hello,
How can we help you?
× How can I help you?