Expense management software for better financial control

Spend management software helps businesses manage their spending. In Payhawk's case, our spend management software can support businesses in the various ways they spend, and automate much of the process involved. Our software supports multiple spend management requirements, including company cards, reimbursements, employee expense management, supplier invoice (bill) payments, invoice management, accounting system/ ERP integrations, and subscriptions. Spend management software must help businesses get a good view over their spending in order to support budgets and cost control. And, it must help make associated accounting easier and more streamlined.

A spend management company offers businesses the various tools they need to manage spending within their organisation, including providing reporting and visibility over money spent. At Payhawk, we help companies manage not only reimbursable employee expenses like per diems and mileage but also supplier invoices and subscriptions. Spend management should typically include ways to empower employees to spend while helping the business stay in command of cash flow with proactive and reactive controls (like approval workflows) built into company 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 bills payments/supplier invoices, company cards, and employee expenses and reimbursements. It includes specific ways to manage and control spending, including approval workflows, accounting integrations and automation, and real-time reporting. Expense management, however, only covers expenses. Even so, expense management covers many formats, including 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. Any digital payments can be easily uploaded to the portal as PDFs, and any physical receipts need only be snapped by a phone camera and uploaded to the app. The OCR technology in the Payhawk portal automatically uploads all of the information, so the employee (and admins in the finance team) avoid 95% of manual data entry. Employees don't need to collect receipts throughout the month or fill out endless spreadsheets. The finance team admins can see what receipts and invoices are still missing, and the portal sends automatic reminders to users to reduce receipt chasing. Our customer AIOPSGROUP reports that they have saved approx' 2h daily and up to 1-2 days in terms of resolution time 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 within a framework when it comes to spending. Tineke Van Maerken, VP of Finance at our customer 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 in 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 app on their phone or laptop.

By using Payhawk, businesses can close the month up to five days faster. Bank reconciliations and syncing transactions and invoices 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. Time is saved on receipt chasing, too, as the mobile app asks the user to attach their receipt directly after the transaction (and sends them reminders throughout the month if they haven't.) Also, Payhawk customers will have a unique IBAN so that the business can pay employee reimbursements and bills via SEPA Instant and Faster Payments.