Expense Management: Definition, Types, Examples & Templates

To save time, many companies use expense management software such as Oracle. This simplifies the process and automates many everyday tasks, keeps more accurate records and alerts users to expense reports in need of review. Connect your expense reporting process with your other systems like accounting software to avoid manually entering the same data twice. Expense management is a systematic set of processes businesses use to record expenses, https://www.bookstime.com/ execute payments, and track their spend. This includes keeping tabs on purchases businesses make, like assets and inventory, as well as the expenses incurred by traveling employees. It also involves defining a spend policy, enforcing it, and finding ways to cut down spending. If it finds the expense in violation of a policy, it notifies the approver and the employee by flagging the expense and bringing it to their attention.

After receiving the expenses, a manager or controller manually reviews and approves the request. Once the manager has approved the claim, they forward it to the accounts department for processing. Ideally expense management tools should not require employees to spend out of pocket. However, if staff are required to use their own funds they should be paid back within one week of having their expenses approved. Digital business expense management solutions allow you to collect and analyse useful data on the who, what, when and where of your company spending. The most obvious reason beingthe cost and employee time savings in place of processing a claim for an expense.

Track receipts and record expenses

Your admins can then update these thresholds at any time in just a few clicks to ensure that the tool is responsive to changing business needs. If an employee needs to request more money, they can do this by creating a fund request, again in just a matter of clicks. The budget owner can then choose to approve or reject the request from wherever they are via the app on their phone or laptop. Build reports that work best for your business by filtering transactions by debit or credit card, category, employee, supplier, missing receipt, amounts, and more. Create and save your custom filtered views, so they’re always handy. No need to wait until you’re back at your desk, approve requests quickly with smart expense management software via the Payhawk App on your mobile device.

Furthermore, expense management software such as Volopay provides spend analytics to exercise better expense control and streamline your AP workflows significantly. An expense management software can be a real boon when it comes to credit card reconciliation. The software automatically matches expenses, receipts, and transactions, erasing manual intervention from the equation. It also integrates with credit card providers to get direct feeds on the expense management dashboard. This helps finance teams get real-time insight into where exactly the spend is happening instead of just the information that spend is happening. A switch from paper and Excel-based expense reporting to digital can be a significant transformation for businesses.

Make your expense reporting effortless. Try Zoho Expense today!

Small businesses have fewer expenses than large corporations, while a mid-sized or larger company needs more extensive functionality, which requires a bigger budget. Decision-makers have a plethora of real-time information and analytics containing all the transactions across the company. They can sort it all by department, project, and product type among others to allocate budgets better, set daily allowances, and generally make more informed business decisions. From traveling fees to marketing to other professional services, everyone should know the current budget and who to turn to for questions. Management just wants proper expense tracking for risk management and more opportunities for growth and productivity. The finance team uses it to maintain accurate financial records and make future business decisions using past trends.

• The best expense management tools will be intuitive and user-friendly, since they’ll need to be accessible by all your employees.
• Mesh is backed by industry partners Tiger Global, Alpha Wave, TLV Partners, Entree Capital, Meron Capital, R-Squared Ventures, and Launchpad Capital.
• You can access your software from every computer or smartphone, from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection.
• From my personal experience, Zoho expense is one of the best software for any organization, which enables to Manage the travelling and spending for a business very effectively.

Pleo is also expanding horizontally adding products ranging from invoice management to employee reimbursements to lending and credit and beyond. Emblematic is the case of Jeeves, the startup has grown to a $2.1B valuation in less than 2 years, raising almost $400M in equity and debt. Jeeves describes itself as “an all-in-one corporate card and expense management platform for global startups” and is building out its own global BaaS layer. All the infrastructure and the software tools a business use are considered technology expenses. The fixed pay a business offers its employees or the variable pay such as incentives and bonuses, or payments to contractors form the major chunk of any business’s expense.

Why Is Expense Management Important?

Best of all, the right analytics tools can help you can spend more efficiently. Volopay offers rule-based expense policy enforcement that allows you to configure it into the system through submission and approval policies. This prevents employees from processing payments and claims without surfacing the necessary documentation needed for verification, such as invoices, receipts, and notes. Expense management is more than simply keeping track of your employees’ reimbursement claims. Finance teams need to maintain accurate records for financial planning, while corporate leadership uses expense reports to evaluate risk management and identify cost-saving opportunities.

Fortunately, an automated expense management software simplifies the process of creating expense reports. However, the clunky spreadsheet, hours of manual data entry, and paper receipts can be avoided. When it comes to making expense reports and approving them, nobody likes it. Whether it is the employee, the finance team, the CFO, or the accountant, nobody wants to do the hassle. Don’t forget that you can unlock the use of corporate credit cards, a popular method for handling business expenses.

Ineffective expense approval workflows

This more rewarding work will increase their satisfaction levels and reduce the likelihood of them leaving. The built-in features screen the expense claims to detect and mitigate violations effectively. On detecting a violation, the software can notify the approver and the employee automatically. This saves time for the approvers, who would otherwise have to manually verify claims against policies and email the submitters. Automated expense management solutions should be easy to use and set. There are many solutions available but they have complex interfaces and you have to assign a full-time team member to use them. The manager has to make sure that the expense requests submitted are authentic and accurate.

Specifically, online platforms automatically help manage the statements for these cards. Some solutions even integrate directly with the credit card companies so that you don’t miss a single transaction. The ongoing popularity of expense management solutions indicate the demand from the market for an automated approach. These systems use software to eliminate paper-based workflows, reduce waiting times, and perform error-free data input and reporting. By definition, expense management is a system of organization deployed for processing expense reports, approvals, and employee reimbursements.

Expenses might be related to a department’s daily operating activities or as part of employee travel. Managers can pre-approve budgets, employees can track their expenses on-the-go, and finance teams are able to automate processes and efficiently manage expense reports what is expense management and reimbursements. A spend management solution is a system that allows you to process expenses as efficiently as possible. This may be a petty cash box and a ledger, a business credit card and a spreadsheet, or a prepaid card and an expense management software.