Empower your employees with automated expense management

How does expense management affect your employee experience?

You can massively improve your employee experience by introducing software that automates expense management. With smart expense management software, they can submit their expenses with just a few clicks or taps. No more carrying around receipts, digging around for spend policies, or navigating reminders from the finance team.

So how does automated expense management work?

Well, for reimbursements, it can go something like this: the employee initiates the process by submitting an expense report with the required information. The system automatically tracks and verifies the transaction against the company's policies, and if everything checks out, it creates a payment request. This is sent to the finance team for approval. If they approve it, the payment is made directly to the employee’s bank account.

But there is an even easier way. With a spend management solution like Payhawk, that includes corporate visa cards and expense management, every time an employee spends with the card the expense is instantly recorded in the software, and all the employee needs to do is snap and upload a picture of the receipt, choose a category and done. In Payhawk, even the data upload is automated by our OCR tech (meaning not manual receipt data entry required).

How does automation help the card user?

If your business uses a credit or debit card for their business expenses you can gain multiple benefits by also automating your expense management. This will save you time and encourage business agility with flexible company spending.

If you don't have company cards backed by a powerful automatic expense management workflow, you may be missing out on the following benefits:

1. Convenience – Cards are easy to use and depending on the carrier you can spend anywhere in the world.

2. Control – You (and your finance team) can keep an eye on how much you spend as you’ll see each in real-time. You can easily spend within policy too, as with Payhawk for example, the policy is built into the cards and expense software via approvals and spend limits.

3. Security – You can carry just one card (instead of many different cards), so there’s no risk of losing all your cards at once or having to remember which card has what balance on it.

4. Flexibility – The money comes off your account immediately so there’s no delay in paying bills or vendors.

Automation also gives you peace of mind. With Payhawk, you can set your spend categories using custom fields. So, you don’t have to worry about whether or not a card was used for project-related expenses, because these are super easy to select from a dropdown menu.

Automated expense management for the admin/ finance manager

The finance manager is responsible for the effective management of the organisation’s financial resources. This includes the preparation of financial statements and reports, accounting, budgeting, controlling, and auditing. This role will also include managing forecasting and planning systems, risk management, treasury management and financial analysis.

The finance manager also has a key role in ensuring that an organisation’s financial resources are managed effectively to maximise returns on investment while minimising risk.

In order to perform these functions effectively, the finance manager needs to record all expenses accurately and identify any problems as soon as possible so they can be corrected before they become serious.

As the finance manager, an automated expense management software enables you to:

• Create expense reports within minutes – instead of hours or days
• Integrate with your existing ERP or accounting software
• Generate invoices automatically based on approved expense reports
• Reduce data entry and processes by up to 80%

As a manager, you have enough to do on a day-to-day basis. The last thing you need to worry about is manually approving employee expense reports. Automating your expense management system to approve spend up to certain set amounts can save you time while still maintaining control over what employees can and cannot spend their money on.

How automated expense management helps the accountant

Your accountant is responsible for making sure that every process is carried out efficiently and legally, and they are responsible for keeping the company ready for audit and out of any possible tax troubles.

But how much time do they need to spend on your business expenses? And what can be implemented to make their work easier?

If you have an accountant or accounting department in your business, then you'll need to automate your expense management process. For example, if your company spends £500 per month on office supplies, the accountant can create a recurring transaction.

This way, every month the transaction will be listed in the cash flow report and it will be easy for them to see what has been spent on office supplies.

The main benefit of automating expense management is that it saves time. The automated expense software has a lot of advantages over manual methods, including:

Reducing administrative burden: As well as eliminating human error, automated systems take away some administrative burden from the accounting department who are responsible for managing expenses. With Payhawk’s direct integration, all data is synced into the ERP directly without any extra effort from your accountants. So, they can focus on other aspects of their jobs instead of having to track and submit expenses manually each month.

Improving accuracy: When you use an all-in-one tool like Payhawk that automatically updates your expenses (and even tracks mileage reimbursements), there’s no room for error. You have complete oversight over what gets submitted and when it gets submitted, so there’s no chance that someone will leave something out by mistake or forget to submit an expense data on time. It's all taken care of automatically and allows for easy reconciliation of expense accounts.

In conclusion

A common misconception is that automating your business expense management means you have to give up control over expenses. The truth is that by using automation, you save time and gain more control over the process. The end result is greater efficiency and better visibility into your company’s spending habits.

In truth, automation of expense management is not a new concept. Many enterprises have been doing it for years with their company expense reports, but now technology has evolved to include a variety of other business expense categories. Time is money, so automating your business expense management process can save you both.

Automated tools like Payhawk’s expense management software, enables data entry electronically from anywhere in the world, in real-time. This also eliminates any confusion about what receipts or any other data are missing, and allows managers to review expenses on demand.

If you're ready to save time and money with an all-in-one brilliant tool to automate your expense management process, book a demo today.