Expense management: The five biggest benefits of bulk features in 2024

Data suggests that 40% of workers waste a quarter of their week on manual work — with email, data collection, and data entry taking up the most time. The mindblowing part? Many of these repetitive tasks can be automated, freeing up a large portion of the working week and allowing employees to focus on business activities that add value.

It’s no different when it comes to business expense management. Automating expense management processes (and doing things in bulk) frees up resources, reduces errors, and ensures your financial data is as accurate as possible to make impactful business decisions that will help you scale your business.

The need for bulk expense management features

Bulk expense management features are essential for dialling up your spend management processes. Without them, you’ll end up wasting your time and money correcting sloppy data entry mistakes, flipping back and forth between screens, checking supplier details to match those on file to pay invoices promptly, and manually matching expense reports with bank transactions before reimbursing out-of-pocket staff.

Manually managing this process is more than time-consuming; it’s also riddled with errors. So, if you really plan to scale, you’re going to need to work in bulk.

Five benefits of bulk features in expense management

Bulk features are the unsung heroes of expense management, making life easier for businesses with big ambitions. They save time by letting your business tackle heaps of expenses in one go, giving you more freedom to pursue your goals. But it's not just about time-saving — bulk features also ensure compliance by helping enforce expense policies across the board, reducing the risk of costly errors and fraud, and more.

To celebrate the release of new bulk review and pay features, we put our reporter's hats on and asked our global colleagues what they love best about working in bulk. Here are the top five responses:

1. "You can save time spent on manual tasks! With bulk actions, you can tackle multiple expenses or records at once, cutting down on manual effort and giving you more time for other important things."
2. "Definitely, compliance is a big one! Bulk features make it easy to enforce spending policies across your organisation, cutting down on the risk of non-compliance. Plus, by minimising errors that come with manual data entry, they help ensure expenses are accurately recorded, reducing the chance of fraud."
3. "Increase productivity: bulk operations streamline tasks for your finance team, freeing them up to tackle strategic projects instead of getting bogged down in manual data sorting, which takes forever."
4. "It can save businesses a lot of money. By automating processes in bulk, they can slash administrative costs and improve their overall financial management."
5. "Plan for growth! As your business expands, transaction volumes skyrocket. Luckily, bulk features are here to help. By bundling repetitive tasks together, they ensure smooth sailing even during rapid growth, allowing your organisation to scale up without any unnecessary process disruptions."

Payhawk bulk features for scalable expense management

Scaling your organisation is exciting. Still, having the right software in place is extremely important to make that growth happen quickly and efficiently.

That’s where Payhawk comes in. And our suite of bulk management features that help make digital expense management effortlessly scalable:

• Reimburse in bulk: Let's say you have 17 expenses outstanding to reimburse. Reimbursing them all individually will drain resources. With our solution, you can select multiple expenses and all employees in just a few clicks, optimising financial reviewers' day-to-day expense processing routine and improving the employee experience.
• Add and remove employees in bulk: Bulk adding and removing employees from the system simplifies user management and keeps your systems safe when employees leave your company. (And, if you integrate Payhawk with your HR solution, you can seamlessly remove employees from all systems). So, if you dismiss an employee, you're not worrying about them accessing your systems after they leave the premises and destroying important documents or stealing sensitive data. Instead, you keep your data under lock and key at all times. For example, if one of your branches is forced to shut down, you can close all employee accounts in one branch with a few clicks.
• Bulk issue cards: If you manage multiple entities or have a large workforce, bulk issuing corporate cards makes the job much easier. Select which employees you want to issue cards to, whether the card is virtual or physical, and which delivery address to send the card (if applicable). Not only can you cut down time on issuing the cards this way, but you can also bulk set card limits, auto-block cards, and choose who can and can't make ATM withdrawals.
• Review expenses in bulk: Data suggests that 25% of financial professionals need ten or more calendar days to close the month-end. With Payhawk, you can easily cut down your month-end process and ensure all upcoming payments are scheduled, reducing manual errors and saving your financial team precious time.

Keep tight control of expenses while empowering employees

Employees need to spend company funds to scale the business — after all, you’ve got to spend money to make money. But you don’t want to give them free reign to spend however they please. By setting bulk card spending limits and closely controlling corporate card spending with our solution, you can keep a tight grip on spending — and monitor and update in real time.

That means you decide how much employees can spend on restaurants, business travel expenses, etc. And, by setting these limits behind the scenes (and building them into the cards and expense app), you don’t need to rely on employees to comply with your expense policies — they have no choice but to remain policy-compliant.

Having this level of control over expense management can help you produce trustworthy financial data, which is essential for planning and achieving business growth. Learn more about how our automated and bulk expense management software can help you scale your business. Schedule a demo.