Beyond one-size-fits-all: The role of customisation in expense management

Customisation is key when it comes to expense management software, supporting flexibility, agility, and adaptability as your business grows.

Without it, you can face some major issues, including the following seven challenges.

Lack of customisation in expense management: The seven challenges facing your organisation

Managing business expenses shouldn’t be a headache, but clunky processes and manual work often make it one. Slow approvals, messy reconciliations, and limited visibility can waste time and money. The good news? With the right tools, you can customise and automate your workflows to stay in control. Here are seven common expense management challenges — and how to fix them.

1. Rigid and inefficient approval processes

If you can’t customise your approval workflows and expense management processes to fit your company policies, you’re going to end up with slow, inefficient approval processes.

No organisation creates an expense approval workflow, activates it and thinks ‘that won’t ever need changing again.’ Organisational processes change, whether you plan for them or not, especially as you grow. Therefore, you need a flexible solution (like Payhawk) where you can create as many custom approval workflows as your organisation needs without charge.

2. Manual reconciliation processes drain time and resources

Manually managing your reconciliation process for expenses and receipts means delays in financial reporting and increased errors in reconciliation tasks.

So don't do things manually anymore; it's as simple as that. Look for a spend management solution that can automate and speed up a lot of your important processes.

At Payhawk, for example, our OCR (optical character recognition) technology and corporate cards make employee expenses easy to manage and ensure all reconciliations happen in real time. Employees can scan their receipts or upload an invoice in our mobile app and our AI works its magic, automatically extracting important expense information. Then, with smart auto-categorisation rules layered on top, processing your expenses becomes a zero-touch activity.

You can also create custom fields to support your categories, letting your cardholders code expenses correctly from the outset using customisation that’s specific to your business, making expense reporting more efficient, accurate, and highly customisable.

Howard Thompson, Global Financial Controller at GDS Group, says:

"Our biggest benefit is around the live real-time information we get in the business. Payhawk has done a great job of ensuring that we can get custom fields and project codes from NetSuite into Payhawk. We use the custom fields when creating and adding expenses in the Payhawk solution — so each event has a project code — then, as we’ve coded all of our expenses up in the Payhawk solution, we can report on margins by event and so on.

3. Non-customisable monitoring features mean no real-time visibility

Not being able to track and monitor your expense data means you don’t have control over spend. And being in the dark about is not an option if you want to scale, forecast and plan.

A customisable solution can help you set card limits and restrict spending with advanced card controls to suit specific business needs.

You can also nip overspending in the bud by:

• Autoblocking employee cards when expense submissions are overdue to keep them policy-compliant,
• Effortlessly pinpoint troubling spending patterns
• Make informed spending decisions with unmatched visibility across all global spending to make multi-entity spend management a breeze

4. Manual employee reimbursements cause unnecessary financial delays

When an employee pays out of pocket for purchasing something on behalf of the organisation, they expect prompt reimbursement — who wouldn’t? But if you manage this process manually, you can’t move fast enough.

So, what’s the answer? You have a few options;

• You can either create customised reimbursement workflows, which will help streamline the entire process and provide timely payments to employees.
• Or, you can issue virtual cards for any employee needing to spend company funds. This initiative means you don’t have to reimburse them; they’re never out of pocket, and you can issue single-use virtual cards to protect company funds for sporadic spenders.

Let’s look at the strain manual reimbursements can cause with an example from Luxair (Luxembourg’s flag carrier airline).

Before Payhawk, the Luxair team was drowning in manual expense management tasks and they knew there was a better way. Every employee had to pay for business expenses from their personal bank accounts and claim them back, for example. Receipt collection was manual, and expense reports were written by hand before being sent to HR for reimbursement.

VP of Finance at Luxair, Tineke Van Maerken, explains how Payhawk has changed how they now manage their expenses:

The Payhawk App helps keep us agile, as even employees without company cards can submit out-of-pocket business expenses in seconds. And those with cards? The employee simply sends a request through the Payhawk App for additional funds, including an explanation, and I can approve it instantly.

5. Difficulty allocating expenses to specific projects or cost centres

Without customisation, you have to assign and track expenses for projects and cost centres manually. Manual tasks like these can lead to inaccuracies and delays in project reporting. If you want project deadlines met on time and within budget, customisation is the ticket.

Being able to create unlimited custom expense categories means you can easily manage multiple smaller expenses within a project. So you can embrace accurate budget tracking and better financial management.

6. The inability to customise payment runs hinders recurring payment management

Paying vendors on time builds trust and strengthens your ability to negotiate better terms. To stay on top of recurring payments and avoid errors, you need flexible, customisable payment runs that keep supplier details accurate and prevent missed payments.

With customisable supplier management features, you can streamline your payment processes and reduce manual interventions and…

• Sync supplier information across your tech stack to ensure vendor details are always accurate and auto-populate supplier details to reduce manual data entry errors
• Use our automated supplier-based expense categories to improve account and bookkeeping
• Schedule payments so you never miss a subscription payment again
• And better manage your online subscription spending by quickly identifying duplicate or underused subscriptions

7. Lack of integration options causes reconciliation delays and manual data entry errors

Financial reporting must be accurate to drive business decisions like resource allocation, cash forecasting, and budget planning. That’s why it’s crucial to have software integrations that work seamlessly with your ERP and accounting systems.

At Payhawk, our integrations support the seamless data flow between spend management and your ERP, meaning you get real-time reconciliation across all your transactions, giving you a single source of truth for spend data.

Setting up the ERP is simple, too, as our custom accounting template builder helps us build and edit powerful Excel and CSV accounting templates so you can rearrange data fields and set complex conditional rules and formatting details to suit your business needs.

Martin Reindl, Director of Implementation at Payhawk, explains:

During implementation, we always ask customers to fill in a 'bulk import template' where they can put users, cards, VAT rates, custom fields, values, etc. We use this information to configure their integration accurately from the beginning with all the important master data.

Customisable spend management opens the gateway to better financial control

Customisable spend control allows you to create rules and set limits based on your specific organisational needs, which is essential. It helps control overspending, improve financial control and compliance, identify cost-saving opportunities, give you valuable real-time insights and more.

Customisable spend management opens the gateway to better financial control

Customisable spend control allows you to create rules and set limits based on your specific organisational needs, which is essential. It helps control overspending, improve financial control and compliance, identify cost-saving opportunities, give you valuable real-time insights and more.

The element of customisation means customers like PinPoint Media can create tailored approval workflows that meet the needs of different departments and projects:

Daniel Tang, Finance Manager at PinPoint Media, describes:

The Workflow Designer is a really easy-to-use, flexible tool. It has improved efficiency within the business, allowing different people to approve the costs of their projects. It also supports additional customisation by letting us adapt the workflows based on different projects and different departments. However, it best fits in with cost approvals for projects.

Ready to embrace the flexibility of expense management customisation? Request a demo.