A game-changer: Reviewing company expenses in bulk (and how to do it!)

Discovering a way to process expenses in bulk is a relief. If you're overwhelmed by manually handling each expense, this blog is for you. We’ll cover why scalable expense management is essential, the advantages of bulk reviewing, and how to do it with Payhawk.

Your company’s growing — find a scalable solution to grow with you

As your company grows and becomes more complex, managing spending can quickly become a major challenge. Processes that were once simple to manage manually now drain time and resources. Growth is great, but to keep it seamless, you need the right solutions and processes to help you scale efficiently.

Scalable expense management solutions will help you manage your business finances competently, accurately, and efficiently while also giving you complete visibility and oversight into spending. Without visibility into company spending habits, you can’t make actionable cost-saving decisions, reallocate resources where necessary, or improve your employee experience — overall, it restricts growth.

Heroes CFO Giancarlo Bruni recalls juggling finance management at his fast-growing company as they scaled:

I had to manually track all the payments at the end of the month. And I was finding invoices and sending emails, like, who spent £10 here? Who spent £10 there? We couldn't control the month-end as we grew and needed more control over spending.

Five strategies for managing expenses in bulk

Here are five ways to ensure a more efficient bulk expense management process.

1. Implement expense management software

If you're currently managing expenses using spreadsheets, it's easy to lose track of the expense process — who's submitted what, and who needs to share additional information? Instead, using expense management software can keep everyone informed about where their expense is in the process, helping you embrace automated expense management and making everyone's jobs a lot easier.

2. Create clear expense policies

If your non-finance coworkers don't know what they can and cannot expense, you're creating a long, drawn-out expense process in which you reject expenses, ask questions, and give everyone a lot more work to do (not to mention staff spending out of pocket!).

Outline exactly what you classify as reimbursable expenses, and communicate these with the company. Make sure your coworkers have access to these policies digitally so they can educate themselves if they forget certain aspects.

3. Introduce corporate cards

Using corporate cards means all employee expenses are easier to track, and you don't need to reimburse people for spending their own money. Instead, you can spot spending patterns and decide who gets what budget and other spending limits, giving you ultimate control over business spend (without constantly pestering staff to reign in the spending).

With Payhawk, you can issue corporate cards physically or even as virtual cards (NB: virtual cards give you better protection against card fraud or theft, with options to issue or freeze them instantly).

4. Automate the approval processes

Relying on other approvers to make the process go smoothly can mean chasing each person to ensure they sign off expenses promptly. However, automating this process via approval workflows makes the entire operation much more efficient. Approvers or budget owners get push notifications reminding them to approve or reject expenses (or ask for more info), which means less time chasing receipts.

5. Conduct regular expense audits

To manage expenses in bulk, you need employees to do their bit — expense correctly. Regular audits can help you identify patterns of employees perhaps not adhering to your expense policies and notice areas where employees might need a refresher course.

Reviewing business expenses in bulk with Payhawk

For finance and accounting professionals who need to check expense credibility regularly after approval, reviewing expenses in bulk means saving plenty of time. Less time clicking means more time actually reviewing.

Bulk expense reviewing with Payhawk is quick and easy:

1. Log into your Payhawk portal and click on the ‘expenses’ tab
2. Select all the outstanding expenses you want to review. Click multiple or select all.
3. Now that your expenses are selected, you can choose a bulk action, such as ‘review’ or ‘reject’, or add comments in bulk.
4. You can still click on an individual expense to open it and read more details if necessary.
5. Once you’ve finished reviewing expenses in bulk, you can export the data by selecting ‘export’ and choosing a format to export (e.g., PDF, CSV).
6. It’s time to analyse your exported data. Create pivot tables or Gantt charts to understand your data better and report to shareholders or leadership teams

Another great feature to speed up expense reviews is our Review Assistant! Configuring the assistant will allow you to quickly see which expenses you need to investigate and which ones you can quickly review in bulk, reducing risk for finance teams. You can customise expense warnings that fit your requirements, like rules for edits made by employees, values missing from the attached document, and much more.

The Review Assistant makes the tool super efficient for finance teams processing large volumes of expenses.

Ready to save your spend management sanity? Start expensing in bulk with our new feature. Request a demo or read more about the power of bulk features in our spend management platform.