What to Look for in an Expense Management Software

With business travel on the rise in recent years, firms throughout the world are facing several issues in controlling their business travel costs. If an organization uses the traditional technique of controlling expenses, it may become stuck in managing different areas of its business operations or processes.

Investing in expense management software can help travel managers and finance managers streamline this process.

An expense management software has been designed to streamline the company's expense management process, saving time, money, and effort. The software simplifies filing for your staff, improves approval operations, and accelerates cost reimbursement. However, most businesses struggle to select the right expense management software.

This article discusses several important factors that travel managers or financial managers should look for before investing in the right expense management software:

Features to Look for Before Investing in Expense Management Software

1. Digital Receipt Capture

The usual way to manage expenses is by collecting and saving physical copies of various expense receipts from employees. The finance staff members, on the other hand, must enter all of the information from these receipts into a spreadsheet.

This may be quite difficult for the finance team and employees since, in addition to performing their tasks and meeting deadlines, they must manage all of these small bits of paperwork. This strategy is extremely inefficient and may lead to employee unhappiness.

As a result, the expense management software you want to invest in should include a digital receipt-capturing capability. This function allows employees to effortlessly scan and capture their expenses while on the move. This application rapidly and properly records all of the information in the expense report, saving your staff a significant amount of time and effort.

2. Interactive User-Interface

Imagine having each employee manually enter their expenses into a spreadsheet regularly. This process is not only time-consuming but also extremely difficult. You have to look for solutions for employees to promptly file their expenses while using the remaining time to focus on essential tasks.

As a result, you must transition from a traditional spreadsheet-based system to an automated one to ensure your business travelers have a more easy expense submitting process.

Thus, while investing in expense management software, make sure it offers an engaging user interface for employees. A user-friendly interface is essential for widespread acceptance and simplicity of use among all employees.

A visually appealing and well-organized interface improves user experience, reduces training time, and encourages employees to stick to expense policies.

3. Mobile Application

Currently, if your company does not use expense software, employees must physically gather and save all expense receipts. They may lost or misplaced during this process. This can lead to issues if there is no mobile expense reporting.

As a result, consider investing in software that offers mobile expense tracking features on both iOS and Android platforms. This allows your staff to use the software from anywhere at any time and effortlessly file expenses. They also receive notifications when their expenses are approved or rejected.

4. Intuitive Dashboard

If your organization uses a manual expense tracking method, your finance team must handle various spreadsheets and go through mountains of paper receipts. This may be a major burden, especially during expense audits, because it allows for additional mistakes and is a time-consuming process.

Consider investing in software that includes an intuitive or customized dashboard. Such a dashboard allows your finance teams to view employee and department expenses on a single platform. This saves them a lot of time because they don't have to sort through several paper receipts.

5. Approval Process Workflow

One of the primary reasons why employees do not receive their expense reimbursements on time is due to the confusing approval workflow. Each expense claim must go through many approvers before it is approved. In cases when the nature of the expenses is unclear, conflicts between the employee and the approver may arise.

As a result, you should seek an expense solution that offers multi-level and well-structured approval workflows. The software will assist you in defining workflow based on employees, department, expense type, destination, and other factors.

6. Advanced Reporting and Analytics

Business travel involves more than just employees visiting other places and engaging in business-related activities. It also involves reducing travel expenses, maintaining policy compliance, and preventing fraud. To achieve these goals, you must first understand your employee's spending habits.

Look for software that can help you categorize costs and reports, evaluate employee spending habits, keep track of policy violations, obtain department-specific spending, visualize crucial expense data, and much more. Having such tools allows you to make more informed financial decisions and prevent cost leakages.

7. Data Security

Expense management is not easy. It involves keeping confidential and sensitive information about employees, including invoicing and personally identifiable information (PII). As a result, travel managers and the finance department must use extreme caution when dealing with this data.

Invest in business travel expense management software that employs a strong data security infrastructure with well-defined policies, access restrictions, and best-in-class technology. Additionally, search for a cloud-based security solution that keeps all data in highly secure data centers.

Choose the Right Expense Management Software for your Business

Investing in the right expense management software may transform how your company manages spending. Consider all of the features covered in this blog to ensure that the software you pick meets your unique needs and adds the most value to your organization.

Hourglass IT's business travel and expense management software simplifies the expense management process by consolidating expense submission, approval, and reimbursement in a single platform. You will also receive instant notifications for any pending expense reports and have access to extensive fraud detection features.