Businesses, big or small, can’t run efficiently if they don’t get their finances right. Keeping a check on how and where your spendings are going is extremely vital, especially if you are a small business owner. Managing and tracking all your expenses manually would be a hectic task and is highly time-consuming.
Therefore, you need an effective expense management system that ensures flawless reporting of your spendings. Such an automated tool can take care of your policy compliances and spot fraud cases at once. Having financial stability and maintaining your cash flows is vital to make your business grow.
So, what are the expense management challenges that small and medium-sized businesses face and how they can solve them? Let’s find out.
1. Lack of Control
First, and foremost, you need to ensure that all your employees are making authorised use of your company funds. The traditional expense tracking systems allowed limited control over your expenditures, thus resulting in unnecessary spendings.
2. Limited Visibility
It is difficult for owners or managers to get a complete overview of how the business cash is used, who is spending them and why. After the money is disbursed amongst the employees, the owner is unaware of how it is spent. Hence, it becomes difficult to reconcile the amount you think is spent on the actual expenditure made.
3. Increasing Travel Costs
As per the reports of Global Business Travelers Associations, travel costs have made a stark rise by 3.6% over the previous decade. Also, business travel has made a decline of 22%. The primary reason for this increase in travel costs is the rise of airfare and hotel prices. Thus, you can reduce your travel expenses by limiting the number of business trips and meetings, unless extremely necessary. Besides that, you can switch to the online mode of conducting your meetings and conferences.
4. Unauthorised Bookings
Employees have the tendency to upgrade their travel bookings later on, such as by opting for better seats in flights or switch to better hotels. This often leads to unnecessary travel spendings, and sometimes even outside the budget. To solve this issue of unauthorised bookings, you need a system that will automatically let your employees comply with the company policies. This will let them abstain from making additional costs beyond the permitted budget. Also, an effective travel and expense management system would automatically detect such unauthorised spendings and the additional costs made will be recorded, which will not be reimbursed.
5. Data Entry Errors
Are you still using spreadsheets and is such a vast array of data confusing you? Manual data entry work is not only time-consuming, but it is also prone to human errors. This leads to miscalculations and as a result, you end up making a wrong analysis of your finances. Therefore, your business needs an efficient and automated expense and travel management process.
6. Difficulty in Financial Analysis
You cannot analyse and motor all the business expenditures made by using a manual expense management system. Every business owner needs a platform that provides a detailed analysis of your finances. Without accurate data, you cannot make informed decisions or identify your costs saving options.
7. Inaccurate Receipts
To determine the actual costs made, you need to check for accurate and true receipts as submitted by your employees. Also, ensure that the spendings made are authorised and within the allowed budget. Thus, you need a system that automatically gathers data from the uploaded receipts and makes an estimate of the total spendings.
Top Features of Concur Expense
Concur Expense is a cloud-based, automated platform that enables you to make faster and more accurate expense claims. Creating expense reports has never been easier and error-free as Concur Expense can pre-populate receipt images, and charges from credit cards. With Concur Expense, you can:
- Streamline expense management using accurate e-receipts
- Reimburse your employees faster
- Categorise and map all expenses automatically based on receipt photos
- Enforce policy compliances
- Catch spendings from different sources
- Reconcile expenses through card integration
- Manage expenses quickly using mobile apps
- Eliminates expense management hassles for everybody.
How to Capture Receipts with Your Mobile Phone ?
To capture receipts, log into the SAP Concur mobile app, tap ExpenseIt, and take a photo of a receipt. ExpenseIt will then create a line item, selecting the expense category, matching credit card charges, and even itemizing your complicated hotel bills for you. Read more…
WATCH DEMO: Concur Expense
Benefits of Using Concur Expense for SMEs
Concur Expense is beneficial for SMEs in the following ways:
- Improve control over your business spendings, hence boost compliance and productivity.
- Track, analyse and claim your spendings easily.
- The system has integrated expense policies of your company, thus enhancing transparency.
- The custom auditing software present with Concur Expense lets you improve visibility and compliance.
- The seamless data flow enhances visibility into all your business expenditures and lets you have better control over them.
- The web-based and mobile apps of Concur Expense allows you to automate and improve the overall expense management procedure effortlessly.
- Managers can quickly review the submitted receipt images and expense claims, and approve them right from their mobile device.
- Concur Expense populates expense claims automatically through e-receipts generated from hotels, airlines, restaurants, and ground transportation entities.
- The integrated expense, travel, and ERP data enhance reporting, thus offering an overview of the entire company budget and spend.
- Concur Expense is a one-stop solution for reconciling and managing business expenses made via a huge array of company card brands and types.
- You can view all your expense data in detail and high accuracy through Concur’s dashboards, reporting, and analytics. This allows you to control your spendings and take necessary action in a more simplified manner.
- You don’t need to worry about security since the system is designed with ISO 27001, PCI, and SOC 1 / SSAE16 certifications. Moreover, the audits make Concur Expense the best security platform when it comes to accessing and evaluating corporate data.
Conclusion
Concur Expense is beneficial for small and medium businesses and helps to overcome all the expense and travel management challenges you SME owners might face. You can get real-time visibility of your finances and have complete control over them.
As a manager or owner of a small or medium-sized organization, you must try to cut down on your costs in order to grow. And without an automated process, it becomes hard to track where your business cash is going.