Expense management software for better financial control

Spend management software helps businesses manage their spending. In Payhawk's case, our spend management software provides control and insights on spend, and automates much of the accounting busywork involved in expense management. Our software integrates powerful management capabilities for company cards, reimbursements, employee expense management, bill payments, accounting system/ERP integrations, and subscriptions.

A spend management company offers businesses various tools to manage spending. At Payhawk, we help companies manage not only reimbursable employee expenses like per diems and mileage, but also bill payments and subscriptions. Spend management should typically include ways to empower employees to spend while helping the business stay in command of cash flow. At Payhawk, we do this with proactive and reactive controls (like approval workflows) built into business cards and supporting expense management software.

Spend management and expense management are similar, but there is a difference between what each includes. Spend management involves the overarching management strategy, process, and tools to look after supplier invoices, company cards, and employee expense reimbursements. Spend management includes specific ways to manage and control spending, including approval workflows, accounting integrations and automation, and real-time reporting. Expense management, on the other hand, is more focused on the expenses themselves, like per diems, mileage, and more.

Payhawk helps you use your spend data effectively and efficiently. Our solution features customisable 'custom fields' in order to capture the data you need to support your business from a commercial perspective. The custom fields allow you to capture expense data in a way that best helps your business to segment information based on projects, locations, and more. By creating custom fields for spend, you can ultimately define what you report on to make it the most specific and valuable for your business. Watch the Explose customer story to discover how they used custom fields to manage project spend in their digital agency.

Yes. Digital payments can be uploaded to the portal as PDFs and physical receipts can be captured on a mobile phone camera and uploaded to the app. Our OCR technology recognizes the information, so there is no need for manual data entry. Because receipts can be captured and entered so easily in real time, employees don’t have to worry about saving receipts throughout the month or filling out tedious spreadsheets. Finance team admins can see what receipts and invoices are still missing, and the portal automatically sends reminders to users. Payhawk customer AIOPSGROUP reports that they’ve saved two hours a day on expense reporting since using Payhawk.

With Payhawk, your business' expense policies are built into the solution. You can set limits at multiple levels to ensure that you give employees freedom to spend within a framework. Tineke Van Maerken, VP of Finance at Luxair explains, "as an administrator, I can adapt card limits instantaneously to suit the business needs. Every cardholder has a monthly limit — but unexpected expenses can occur beyond the limit, too." Admins can set automatic approval limits on employee fund requests, different levels of approval within the workflows, and multiple employees to approve requests (meaning that approvals get completed even if someone is off).

The Payhawk solution lets admins select individual or team spend thresholds. Your admins can then update these thresholds at any time with just a few clicks to ensure that the tool is responsive to changing business needs. If an employee needs to request more money, they can do this by creating a fund request, again in just a matter of clicks. The budget owner can then choose to approve or reject the request from wherever they are, via the mobile app, at their desk, or on their laptop.

By using Payhawk, businesses can close the month up to five days faster. Bank reconciliations and syncing transactions and bill payments are among the most time-consuming tasks for finance and accounting teams at the month-end close. With Payhawk, these arduous tasks are automated and sent directly to accounting software via an ERP integration. You’ll save significant time on chasing receipts too. When an employee enters a transaction, the mobile app prompts them to attach their receipt (either through upload or by snapping a picture), and automatically sends them reminders throughout the month if they don’t immediately add the receipt.