Tuesday, July 28, 2015

An Introduction to Expense Management Systems for your Firm

The prime objective of every business organization is to grow in profitability and size with every passing year. Growth of the company is proportional to an increase in the workforce and business orders and a consequent increase in management. Managing a large organization is no cakewalk. Finance management is nothing less than a nightmare. It includes the responsibility of accounting for every single resource in the company, be it something as trivial as stationary or as complex as employee records. This, undoubtedly, involves tracking every expense incurred by the company and backing it up with relevant paperwork which is always accompanied by a high risk of human error accidental or intentional. Records have to be cross checked at every step. The process is redundant, time consuming and is a complete waste of billable man hours. To eliminate this, a large number of companies have now started to rely on expense management systems.

An expense management system is a system that most businesses incorporate to process, pay, and keep track of employee- initiated expenses in the company. With this, the finance division can track every expense ranging from food to travel. They can also integrate the spending system with the company policy system to ensure that the employees do not overspend. With an efficient expense management application, an employee can raise a claim, gain clearance, and get the claim reimbursed on the same platform. This is not only time saving, it also reduces the paper consumption in an organization. With the advancement in technology, it is now possible to export the expense management software on to the cloud. By doing so, the application can go mobile and can be accessed both by the employee to raise a claim and by the finance team to process and approve the claim remotely.

Benefits of Expense Management System An expense management system can not only regulate the processes in the finance department, it can also have the following benefits: Since the whole process is automated, the company can reduce the cost of processing and auditing an expense The chances of errors drastically reduce with the automation and numerous levels of cross-reference The system gives the company complete control to achieve compliance with the internal policies and external regulations The organization can do away with paper and spreadsheet forms and can get the approval faster. This task in itself can cut down the company expenditure to a substantial level by reducing the paper consumption/wastage The process brings transparency to the spending patterns in the company It also allows for greater management control and an improved adherence to corporate policies With a closer look at the spending pattern of the company, the management will be in a better position to restructure the company budget and easily manage on-going spending Applications of Expense Management System

An expense management system can be used to perform the following operations: Contract management: an expense management system also keeps track of contracts and can alert the management on any off-contract products and service orders. It will also equip the company with renewal tracking facility

Travel management: this feature can keep track of the employees' travel records and their spending at the location. This can be of assistance when the company is trying to regulate the travel policies Currency conversion: International travel and the accompanying currency conversion issues is a complex process that can be easily simplified by the expense management system. It can convert and calculate exchange rates for accurate reports.

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