Ten expense management challenges facing the renewable energy sector (and how to solve them)
Every industry has its challenges, but the ability to identify these challenges and implement not just workable solutions but the best solutions on the market creates a competitive edge.
Here are ten of the biggest expense management challenges facing the green energy industry today:
1. Disconnected tools
Disconnected tools and onboarding multiple systems like ERPs, bank-issued corporate cards, and expense management apps lead to one thing — fragmentation. Without a well-connected ecosystem, your fragmented tools lead to operational inefficiencies like gaps in communication and opaque, duplicate data.
These data silos then make data-driven decisions impossible. This, in turn, makes it difficult to maintain accurate records, impacting strict regulation compliance such as FERC standards (in the US) or regulations enforced by EEA and OEP. And no one wants that.
2. Manual card reconciliation
Renewable energy projects typically involve high transaction volumes, so it makes sense to implement a solution that eliminates manual work and coding guesstimates from the reconciliation process.
Embrace automatic reconciliation, including OCR (optical character recognition) technology, to reduce human errors and fraud risks and increase real-time visibility and efficiency in one fell swoop.
3. High FX due to accounts in multiple currencies and entities
Whether you're funding projects worldwide or operating a global supply chain, paying high FX rates can eat away at your bottom line, making revenue unpredictable and volatile.
Find a corporate card solution that supports multiple currencies and offers competitive FX rates. (Note: At Payhawk, our corporate Visa cards support payments in 50 currencies and offer a standard fee of 1.99%).
4. Manufacturing or maintenance: Keeping a clear division
To develop and deliver clean energy systems, you've got everything from manufacturing services, like component fabrication and prototyping services, to maintenance services, like hydroelectric assets and wind turbines.
And keeping these services separate has never been easier with multi-entity management software like ours.
At Payhawk, our solution lets you effortlessly add or remove employees across entities, filter expenses, easily maintain data security and compliance and, perhaps best of all, view all your entities from a unified dashboard for complete financial visibility.
5. Missing receipts and late month-end
From field technicians and project managers to engineers and analysts, you have thousands of traveling employees to keep track of and managing the volume can be a major challenge
By introducing an automatic receipt and invoice collection system, you remove the need to keep hold of piles of easy-to-lose paper receipts. Simply take a photo of the receipt in the mobile app and watch as OCR technology automatically extracts the important data.
Connect your ERP for real-time reconciliation to ensure you sync all data in real time for accurate financial reporting and cash flow management.
6. Misuse of funds
With so many employees traveling and using corporate cards, it can be easy to lose track of which expenses were for what purpose, particularly if you’re managing the entire process manually. And this opens your processes up to fraudulent expense claims.
If your current solution lacks proactive card controls, you need a solution with these features in droves. We’re talking advanced card controls and spend limits, like:
- Recurring limits
- Single transaction caps
- Vendor, time, and date blocks
- And more
It may sound rigid, but you can also easily enable employees to request more funds if necessary and auto-approve certain fund limits to ensure that employees are empowered by controls rather than stalled. Often referred to as ‘freedom within a framework,’ far from being limiting, it means everyone knows where they stand.
7. Lost VAT reclaims
Did you know that 25% of finance professionals don’t reclaim VAT because employees submit expense claims with missing or incorrect information?
If only there were a more efficient way of collecting and organizing expense data, you wouldn’t miss out on reclaiming VAT (and a significant amount of money). There is.
At Payhawk, our direct integration with 60dias automatically retrieves VAT from receipts and expense receipts, so you don’t have to, helping some of our customers reclaim an extra 2 million euros a year that would have otherwise been lost.
8. Lengthy bank transfer to advance funds
Sending funds to employees via bank transfers can slow down operations; SEPA transfers alone can take up to a day, and money ends up spread across different systems. To keep things moving and give employees more control, businesses need a faster way for employees to request and receive funds instantly.
With our solution, once your employee submits a fund request, it’s automatically pushed to your designated approver, who can then accept or reject it.
9. Limited card acceptance (when traveling internationally)
The last thing travelling employees need is stress brought on by card acceptance issues. You want to instil confidence that the merchant will likely accept your card wherever you go.
When merchants don’t accept your chosen card, employees might have to use their personal funds, which means they’re out of pocket (and you have to reimburse them promptly and unexpectedly).
That’s where our Visa commercial cards come in. You can use them to pay for everything from car rentals to accommodation, and well over 36 million merchants worldwide accept them.
10. Track carbon emissions
With Payhawk cards and our Payhawk Green features, you can automatically calculate your carbon emissions based on your card spend — no extra effort needed.
Through our integration with Lune, you get instant insights into every transaction's environmental impact, helping you make more sustainable decisions. It’s a simple way to align your spend management with your sustainability goals.
Learn more in the short video below.
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