CFO Tools: How to get CFO buy-in for an expense management solution

No doubt, employees are the most valuable asset, but they're also the most expensive. A company's highest cost is typically salaries. Yet businesses often squander their employees' time by asking them to fill out tedious forms.

Think about your role. Do you find the current expense management procedures frustrating? Do you and your team waste valuable time looking for missing receipts? Do you want to know what the alternatives are? Do you want to put a good case for your finance team to invest in technology?

Here are just some of the reasons your company will benefit from using a modern company card and expense management platform like Payhawk.

1. Expense reports cost time (therefore money)

Laborious expense reports with little automation take time to prepare on the employee's side. And time to process on the accounting or finance team's side. Most companies are unaware of employee time as a cost because it's essentially a fixed cost that can't be easily reduced.

However, by asking employees to hold on to their paper receipts, scan them and attach them to a report, the business is making generous use of the employee's time for an activity that drives zero value to the business. This amounts to a misuse of the company assets, doesn't it? Instead, why not automate the task?

What if tracking, approving, and paying company expenses could happen quickly and instantaneously with a CFO tool or expense management solution? This scenario is what you get with what our customers consider the best company card and expense management solution.

2. Expense reports come late

Expense reports always come late. Do you know why? It’s not because employees don’t want or need their money back (see reason 3).
It’s because they want to spend their time meaningfully; building products, consulting clients, and visiting prospects. In other words, mastering their craft and developing their expertise. Late expenses make the month-end close a lot harder. The expense claim process needs to be as smooth, convenient, and fast as possible to avoid late expense reports.

With Payhawk company cards, every time an employee uses the Payhawk card, they get a notification to upload the receipt via the mobile app. Once they add the picture and some brief information, the expense and the transaction is matched. The end.

Our solution integrates with the most popular ERPs too. So, your expenses and receipts are accurately synced straight to the accounting software of your choice.

3. Employees need the money, fast

It can be really stressful to be low on funds and have to spend your own money to pay for travel, a hotel stay, or a big meal with clients.

Additionally, it’s pretty common for the more junior team members to take care of payments, as more senior members try to avoid being tangled in admin work.

These employees will often live paycheck to paycheck, meaning a pending company expense can get them in trouble paying rent or any other commitment. This situation leads to stress, dissatisfaction, and, if too recurrent, burnout.

Reimbursements can drown your company. The ideal solution? Using company cards linked to intelligent software instead, like Payhawk. The next best? Take advantage of the Payhawk reimbursement feature, which allows accounting teams to reimburse immediately once the expense is reviewed. Payhawk even provides dedicated IBANs to enable instant transfers to employees.

4. Happy employees are performing employees

There's something beautiful in the idea that happy employees are more productive. What if organisational leaders focused on making people feel happier at work and reaped the benefits in productivity and retention?

Luckily, this idea is not just great in theory. It's been proven recently that happy employees work 12% harder.

There are many ways you can make your employees feel more empowered and, therefore, happier. Daniel Pink speaks of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the three key ingredients in his book, Drive.

So, let's start with a key ingredient: autonomy. Giving people their own company cards can give them a sense of autonomy. Meanwhile, easy and automated expense management helps them steer clear of boring and repetitive expense tasks to ensure they can focus on developing their mastery and executing their purpose.

5. Real-time expense data improves the quality of financial data

Ultimately, digitising and modernising expense management with finance and CFO tools can lead to better data and control. Giving you more accurate reports, customisable spend categorisation, in-built spend policy, and more.

Working with Payhawk enables finance and accounting teams to assign different spending to different categories. And because Payhawk integrates directly with several ERP and accounting software, your information can flow smoothly between tools.

As a team member who spends money for work, you understand the pain of travelling, losing receipts, and devoting hours to expenses each month. But it doesn't have to be that way. Your company could benefit from a more efficient way of managing expenses.

Use these five arguments to get buy-in from your finance team and ask them to try a demo with us today.