If you are like most SMB companies, your primary focus is to grow revenue and control company spend. To do that, you leverage technology to eliminate inefficient processes in your day-to-day tasks. So why are so many companies still using manual, paper-based processes to deal with employee expenses?
Excel-based expense reports are often still the norm. But without an automated system to control expenses, you have little or no ability to actively manage company spend. You are left to hope that spending decisions remain within budget and are in compliance with company policies.
Automation is the key to controlling and reducing employee expenses. Here are the top 10 reasons you should automate your expense report process:
#10. Human error costs your company money. It’s simple. Manual processes increase errors. And these errors are costly. Also, incorrect information leads to poor decision-making and missed opportunities, which further exacerbates costs. Automation can reduce and eliminate these errors, leading to cost savings throughout the organization.
#9. Chasing paper around the office is a waste of time. Manual processes are not only costly, but time-consuming. Completing complicated expense reports takes focus off of an employee’s core job tasks. Automating expense reports saves time, allowing the employee to return to more important tasks.
#8. You like really big, fast ROIs. Expense control initiatives allow for more control and accountability over operating profitability. The result when you deploy SaaS solutions? The path to positive ROI becomes shorter.
#7. Great decisions require great information. Even if spending has been well documented, in order to cross-compare data, the individual transactions need to be manually manipulated when using spreadsheets for expense. This approach lengthens the time to analyze when problematic spending occurs. Automated expense report software gathers business data in a centrally accessible location, enabling you to make faster, smarter decisions.
#6. You need to do more with less. In today’s economy, businesses are tasked daily to accomplish more with less. Automation enables companies to process more transactions with less people, increase efficiency and eliminate busy work.
#5. You have no idea how you went over budget, again. Budget accountability and timely reporting are essential to promoting expense control efficiencies. With an automated expense report system, managers can see accurate budget information in real-time and analyze business impact.
#4. Reducing costs improves your bottom line. Travel and expense is just one area where companies experience unnecessary spending. Automation is one of the most beneficial and effective ways that companies can reduce costs without eliminating staff or increasing end-user prices.
#3. You don’t want to see yourself on the nightly news. There is significant pressure on executives to increase regulatory compliance and focus on the audit trail. Automating your expense process is an efficient and less expensive way to achieve and maintain corporate accountability and compliance.
#2. Your sales team thinks the Ritz-Carleton is the only hotel in New York. Policy enforcement is a driver for automation. With automated expense reports, required expense fields are set up in compliance with company spending policies and approval chains. This not only reduces costs, but also changes behavior.
#1. You need control! You lose a little control every time a paper document changes hands. Automation gives you that control back by precisely defining, managing and monitoring expense transactions, providing a real-time view into how your company spends money.
As you can see, the most important reason to automate your expense report process is to gain control over spend. The benefits are tangible – you can see actual dollars being saved quickly. And with new cloud-based solutions, such as Nexonia Expenses, businesses are embracing the concept of automated expense controls and are adopting automated expense report software at a rapid pace.