Five benefits of global expense management

Are you opening entities in new locations? Or running an international business? If you are, you'll already understand the importance of robust financial oversight and transparency, governance and control, and slick overall efficiency to keep things moving. But, understanding and 'doing' are two different things, and there's every chance your business could be managing company spend in an even more joined-up and effective way.

Global companies, global expenses

Many b2b expense solutions offer just one significant, effective feature. One scenario is where you have a solution, potentially a bank, that just covers company cards, for example. Another scenario might be where there's an expense management product that doesn't include any cards. These useful but disparate solutions mean an annoying gap between payments, automated data entry around spend, and a lack of real-time visibility and control.

The final scenario is where some solutions feature both company cards and expense management software, but they lack any global reach and can only be used in Europe, for example, or in the US.

So, what about those international companies that need an easy way to control and manage global expenses via credit cards? As well as the automation benefits of expense management software? Well, those companies would do well to try and find a company that offers credit cards, operates in the UK, the EEA, and the US, and offers spend control, transparency, and automation via clever expense management software. Phew.

But these elusive solutions aren't easy to find. At Payhawk, we’re one of the first such companies to apply our efficiency-boosting services across the UK, the EEA, and the US. We operate in 32 countries across the globe. And our software automates an average of 87% of expense management processes for our customers and saves accounting teams an average of 24 hours of work a month.

By switching to Payhawk, you can manage your global expenses using one tool. Moreover, your Visa debit or business credit cards benefit from a high acceptance rate and low FX rates of around 1.99%. You can also reimburse your employees, no matter where they're based, as our solution supports many different currencies.

Use a sole provider

We know that using multiple, disconnected tools at work feels clunky and inefficient. So, why bother?

Using one company card and expense management tool to track your global expenses across multiple locations means you can reap a lot of benefits, including:

• One excellent user experience
• One connected overview
• Better, more efficient integrations with accounting software and ERPs
• Increased control and efficiencies, including bulk card management

Data entry never felt so good, either. In fact, it all but disappears. Thanks to our optical character recognition (OCR) software, accounting teams save hours and hours of invoice data entry every day. With our solution, all your card users need to do is take a photo of an invoice with their cell or mobile and let the technology auto-input all the necessary information.

Global expense management and resource planning

Effective, agile, and transparent global expense management is a must-have for fast-growing and international scaleups.

At Payhawk, our solution consists of business debit and credit cards and expense management software. Together these elements help support process organisation and governance in multiple ways. From approval workflows and spend caps to bulk card issuance and custom fields for project and team spending, our solution means businesses can control and track their global expenses exactly as they need.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is another vital component for businesses on expansion journeys. Connecting your ERP to our global expense management solution improves oversight and governance. Your finance team can gather spend data from across its different entities in order to assist revenue forecasts and help plan and alter budgets according to performance, for example.

As our customer, Heroes, explains in our guide, How to select the right ERP x expense management integration for your scaleup. "As a CFO, I want to know how much money and profit we have in real-time and what levers I need to pull. We also need to know about our stock, when it's arriving, what's in transit, and if we need more. I can see all of this via my ERP, plus I can see spending in real-time thanks to the direct integration with my expense management software," Heroes CFO Giancarlo Bruni explained.

A company card and expense management solution that integrates with a comprehensive ERP is essential for growing and expanding businesses. "We wanted our NetSuite ERP to be the backbone for our business and considered it an important investment to support our expansion in new markets and increasingly complex structure," said Bruni. "Reporting, accounting, and tax are all vital components of the ERP."

Automation, agility, and approvals

Besides ERP integrations and data automation, there are many other functions that our platform takes care of. We offer customers many customisable features, such as expense management workflows, that support expense policies and help promote robust control and governance.

You can set up workflows to support many different kinds of approval chains. And you can assign relevant decision-makers so only they can take specific actions. Expense approvals become far quicker using our workflows because pending approvals are sent in real-time to the designated person who can then approve in seconds via the app.

Finance team-focused tech lets businesses easily connect expenses to the correct department, project team, or office location. You can also promote control via spend limits. Your finance team can even assign people within the same team with different levels of spend limits or authorise multiple team members to have access to a shared amount of spend via a 'team card.'

Data to improve performance

As any scaleup or growing enterprise knows, gathering data and using it to inform strategy is vital in marketing, budgeting, product development, and virtually every single area of the company.

With Payhawk, your finance team can use data to start connecting the dots in spend and find ways to optimise incomings and outgoings.

Finance teams can use our data reports to check employee, team, project spending, and more, over any period. The multiple customisation options mentioned above help customers improve their data collection capabilities and ensure they link accurately and efficiently with their chosen ERP.

Good spend controls and visibility in governance and finances, including improved reporting and increased compliance, also allows scaleups to attract further investment. Investors want to see that the business has a healthy runway and profitability and firm control of incoming and outgoing cash flow. Your business spend data makes up an important part of this puzzle.

Book a demo to discover how global expense management can help support your business's global expansion journey.