Top 6 trends that will redefine the Expense Management Industry in 2022

Top 6 trends that will redefine the Expense Management Industry in 2022

Business travel serves many functions and impacts a wide range of business objectives, from reinforcing sales to strengthening partnerships, training, customer service, and professional development. Yet many organizations fail to invest in streamlining their Travel and Expense management.

Businesses can no longer rely on manual and legacy systems for expense management. Moving forward, automated solutions for tracking and reimbursing expenses, cloud technology to store receipts, and AI to identify fraud in expense reports can help organizations streamline their business processes.

Here, we delve into those promising technologies in more detail and see how much of an impact they can have on the bottom line of companies.

Improving ROI with Automated Expense Management system

According to research, business travel expenses are the second most challenging operating cost to control. Investing in expense management software is worthwhile, especially if your employees travel a lot. An expense management system offers real-time visibility into your expenses, which will help your business with effective decision-making, policy formulation, and cost-cutting.

Digitize your expense management process

Forrester Consulting conducted a study on the Digital transformation of Travel and Expense (T&E). The outcome of 550 surveys indicates that many companies want to shift towards digital transformation. The survey respondents say that many organizations still rely on outdated tools that add more work burden to the employees, managers, and finance team. Participants agreed that digitization of expense management systems could improve user experience, increase efficiency, and provide detailed insights for better planning and cost control.

Making expense management mobile-friendly

Organizations need to implement technology that makes it easy for business travelers to create reports and apply for reimbursement seamlessly through desktops and mobile phones. Mobile accessibility lets employees track their expenses from anywhere in the world. Employees can use the mobile app to scan and upload receipts and report various expenses. Additionally, the managers or finance team can use the app to instantly approve or reject expense reports. 

Integrated expense management solution

By integrating your expense management solution with enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resource management, or accounting software, you can be on top of your business expenses, boost employee productivity, and bring down your organization’s T&E spend.

Increased reliance on real-time insights

With working capital management continuing to be critical for many organizations, the ability to better forecast upcoming spending will be vital in 2022. Giving finance teams the insights that they need into corporate spending could also have a meaningful impact on decision-making and business growth.

The reporting and analytics feature of top expense management software provide real-time insight into company spending. It provides options to track expense reports by employee, project, and category.

With the help of analytics, organizations will uncover inefficient spending patterns and make better-informed decisions.

An AI-based fraud detection system

Detecting expense fraud and flagging claims that could violate T&E policy has always been an effort-intensive process. Currently, audits and reviews have spotted only around 12% of fraudulent instances. Leveraging AI could be game-changing in expense fraud management. Not only does this reduce the effort, but it will also drive accuracy and predict risks based on historical patterns.

Furthermore, AI is capable is scanning the expense reports in real-time so that reimbursements can be immediately checked in case of potential red flags.

With time, AI is expected to become predominant in expense management, bringing exceptional speed and accuracy in this field.

Conclusion

Travel remains an essential aspect for many organizations today. If your employees are frequent travelers, then you need to be aware of these latest trends in travel and expense management. Without a doubt, emerging technologies like AI, Cloud, and ML can help you automate travel and expense management and consequently streamline the auditing process and boost cost savings significantly.

7-Key-strategies-for-CFOs-to-Gain-Control-of-Expense-Management

7 Key strategies for CFOs to Gain Control of Expense Management

The COVID19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge for CFOs to manage their company’s T&E spending.  

Given the gravity of the situation, it is time for CFOs to step up and reevaluate the various expense management strategies that they have in place to keep business travel expenses in check and prevent fraud. 

Notably, they need to invest in the digital transformation of the expense management process and embrace new-age technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to stay ahead of the curve.

Here, we list some of the top tactics that CFOs need to implement to streamline expense management in the coming years. 

• Transparency in business travel spending

A dedicated expense management system can help CFOs bring about transparency in travel spending by accurately tracking expenses as and when they occur. Overall, an ideal expense management system can help you save loads of time and money while keeping your employees productive and satisfied.

• Clarity in the travel expense budget

Many businesses often point to business travel expenses as their most significant budget items. As a result, CFOs need to develop a travel and expense policy that is clear and reasonable.

This includes setting a maximum budget for each spending category in advance, like business trips, restaurant bills, etc., based on the department and employee designation.

Enforcing practical travel and expense policies can incur benefits like better employee expectations, audit readiness, spend control & insights, and fraud prevention.

• Establish accountability 

Established processes help the employees to rely on and refer them regularly. The first step is to ensure that all managers, supervisors, and employees are aware of the organization’s expense policies. The management team must have easy access to the expense reports their employees are submitting. An expense management software brings more power to the managers with hierarchical or customized approvals for each department. It ensures a high level of accountability.

• Prioritize security

IBM and the Ponemon Institute’s latest data breach report reveals that the average cost of a data breach rose to $4.24 million in 2021, an increase from $3.86 million in 2020. 

Consequently, organizations need to leverage modern technology, such as cloud-based expense management software, to keep your business’s sensitive financial information safe from security breaches.

• Regular audits 

All CFOs should regularly audit their expenses to keep fraud at bay and detect lapses in the expense management process or policies. Expense management audits can pinpoint potential problems, like overspending or fraudulent receipts and help the finance team or managers to make strategic decisions.

• Digitize and automate your processes

According to a 2015 survey by GBTA Foundation, processing a single expense report takes an average of 20 minutes and costs a company $58. Automation eliminates paper or spreadsheet work, reduces admin work, and leads to faster processing of reimbursements.

So, if CFOs prioritize automating and digitizing the expense management processes, it will undoubtedly yield better results and allow your finance and accounting professionals to focus on the economic growth of the business.

• Make strategic decisions with expense analytics

Expense analytics reports give finance team and managers better and real-time visibility into:

• Employee expenses

These reports help you analyze employee expenses and view analytic reports of a policy violation to track excessive spending.

• Targeted insights

You can analyze and track expenses based on projects, category, merchants, etc.

• Real-time updates

You can track the number of reimbursements and cash advances processed for a particular period.

• Data-informed decisions

Statistics and trends related to expense reports and policy violations help you formulate better expense policies.

Hence, expense analytics in a company is extremely valuable for making data-driven decisions that can save millions of dollars in T&E spending. It further enables businesses to compare expenses with budgets to ensure they are not overspending or defrauded.

Conclusion

CFOs should consider implementing all the above strategies to take control of corporate expense management and make strategic decisions on future spending. 

Intuitive software like ExpenseOut helps enforce travel & expense policies easier, thus saving your finance team time and effort.  

If you want to learn more about the capabilities of ExpenseOut, then sign up for a demo today! Please reach out to [email protected] for more details.