Spend Management Software to Manage your Employee Spending Effectively

With spend management solutions, businesses will have increased compliance, data accessibility for improved decision-making and a better idea of spending, making it easy for you to focus on better planning. Around 40% of companies use pen and paper, 27% use Microsoft applications such as Excel to generate expense reports. These old-fashioned paper-based processes are difficult to track, erroneous and vulnerable. All these make employee-initiated spending the second largest controllable expenditure for most organizations.

Cumbersome spend management processes would slow down the reimbursement process. More than 80% of employees state it takes more than a month for expenses to be approved. Mostly, employees get benefit from features such as direct deposit, expense report automation, integrated travel booking, mobile receipt capture, and approval. Automating internal processes and moving to cloud-based expense report systems is where you have to put in an effort to streamline the processes. This way you can set clear budgets for various categories of corporate travel.

With improved expense reporting process, organizations can better control costs and cut down spending by switching to software-as-a-service solutions. Cloud-based expense report software requires less maintenance compared to legacy systems or in-house solutions that require a lot of administrative work.

Cloud-based solutions allow us to easily integrate with other internal systems that a part of the internal processes. Say, the accounting system is a part of the reimbursement process. When you have on-premise systems, you have to maintain data in two different systems, which would require you to manually enter the data into two systems. This would waste a lot of productive time for your finance/accounts department. In contrast, having a centralized system can help you access data between the systems. This allows you to easily interface with the systems and gives you room to analyze the data and make informed decisions. Besides cost savings, scalability and security, cloud-based solutions can help businesses focus on strategic initiatives rather than expense report filing. Automating spend processes can cost a fraction of legacy systems and provides immediate returns on investments.

The benefits of spend-management solutions exceed beyond financials.

Mobility is the best characteristic that users would most like in the automated system. Mobile features such as automatic receipt capture, report creation, and approval are important as workforce become more mobile. Going mobile not only saves employee time but also speed up the internal processes. Mobility alleviates the need to save receipts as employees can just snap a picture directly from their smartphone and attach the receipt to the expense report. Besides this, GPS is another feature wherein employee can track the distance traveled while on the business trip. This prevents the ability to commit mileage fraud as the total distance gets directly populated in the expense report.

Employees who travel frequently should be able to book travel plans, submit invoices or approve travel requests directly from their mobile. This is where your spend management system should include travel booking system. Having a travel booking portal such as SutiTravel allows businesses to define custom rules and policies within the system, so when an employee tries to book an out-of-policy travel, the system restricts when making a booking. This way you can avoid employees from booking out-of-policy trips. Pre-trip approval requests are one more feature that helps you to stay within the budget. In pre-trip approval process, employees should submit an expense request listing the estimated expenses. These travel requests will be sent for approval. Upon successful business trip, employees can directly convert these requests into expense reports, saving a lot of time for both employees and reviewers.

Also, this helps you to define budgets for itneraries and control overage spending. The integration allows you to pull-in the travel data directly from the portal to the expense reporting systems. So, employees need not spend time entering the travel data again into the expense report. Similarly, your spend system should integrate with accounting and invoice solutions so as to streamline other processes.

A modern spend management system allows you to deal with travel, expense reports or invoices in a better way. Choosing a solution such as SutiSpend management system not only streamlines internal processes but also makes it easy for you to manage to spend company-wide. Our integrated system allows various departments to stay connected so you can gain a complete picture of spending, enrich employee experiences, improves decision making, increases compliance and focus on strategic business objectives.

Author Bio:
Kevin Peterson is a content marketing enthusiast, freelance writer at SutiSoft ,
specializing in Business, ERP, Technology and Cloud/SaaS trends.