Posts in category: Industry Solutions

Auditors from startup auditing companies may travel 80% of the time to visit their clients or conduct audits in the field. This means that employers will significantly incur more expense reimbursements as they use public transportation, hotels, flights, meals, and other expenses. In many startup auditing companies, the employees who travel the most are most susceptible to getting their expenses flagged. 

In contrast, employees in the IT industry tend to stay in the office the majority of the time and they travel less, so, unsurprisingly, only 6% of their expenses are flagged as per AppZen.

Startup auditing companies are struggling to detect the potential misconduct

Lawyers and support staff have frequent business trips, long working hours, most time away from home, added work stress, and make the employees feel entitled to fancy dinners or flight upgrades from the company dime. Also with layers of policies, rules, client billing, and travel rules, there is simply more opportunity for expense report misconduct or errors.

Why it is smarter for a startup auditing company to invest in a solution

The major takeaway from this data is that not employees in certain industries commit more fraud, it’s that existing expense policies need to be amended. With an AI-powered solution, finance managers can get a better understanding of T&E to send who proactively identifies who violates the policies, or who has an impactful expense culture across their organization. 

Here are the top 5 reasons why startup auditing companies must have an expense management system

1. Handling and verifying bill receipts of your employees

With an expense management system, handling and verifying bill receipts becomes easier for your employees. It is ideal for auditing companies to have complete control over a company’s expenditures like setting up automatic rules, warnings, and spending limits from the company’s budget.

If a violation is detected, both the managers and employees will be notified, followed by the reason for the policy violation. Therefore, it is also easier to apply for the best T&E policies when the options are synced with the system.

The finance team will be the happiest about adapting to the expense tracking software because they can identify red-flag reports that violate the company’s T&E policy. Approvers can view the violated reports and are flexible on whether to accept or reject the report.

2.Tracking the employees who are 80% away for auditing purposes

Since auditors in startup auditing companies travel almost 80% of their work time, it is harder for the company to track the employees. But in return, employees see a lot of benefits in their career ranging from giving the ability to create networks for the company, products, and services offered, business processes, etc. The auditors will have internal, external, IRS tax, financial, operational, compliance, information system, and payroll. 

With a system, you can get real-time actionable insights into the business travel expenses that can be used for better budgeting and forecasting. The data will be completely synced and available for the managers department-wise or individually to keep track of the individual or group spending. It can identify the top spenders, company policy violators, duplicate expenses, and weekend/holiday expenses. With this actionable data, the auditing company can take insights on what internal action to be taken to improve the process.

3. Reduced manual efforts

In the legacy system, after an employee makes an expense, they need to collect bills and receipts, submit the form for the collected expenses, wait for the expenses to get approved or rejected, send them back for correction if required, and get the expense reimbursement.

With an intelligent expense management system, an employee can log an expense, submit expense details from the app, get it approved or rejected, get it reimbursed, and if the expense is rejected, an employee will have the option to justify it. 

However, every data is recorded for both the employee and manager tracking resulting in fewer follow-ups and verification processes. The manual effort of an employee to get the reimbursement is reduced to a few clicks.

4. Fewer Errors and Delays in Reimbursement

With 1000+ bills and expenses to manage, now employers can manage it faster under the compliance of their submitted cash advances. Also, they can clearly support and manage multi-currency and multi-project. With manual reports, both the finance team and the employees may be susceptible to human data-entry errors that will further get compounded when the finance team transcribes them into spreadsheets. This is completely solved with good expense management software.

Also with automated workflows, employees no longer have to constantly remind their manager and finance department to approve the expense reports. This will result in a faster expense reimbursement process and eliminate process-related delays. The automation features in the expense management system will also send automatic alerts and notifications if the payments are overdue.

5.Get accurate forecasting on what, how, and why your expenses are out of control

You can get yearly, quarterly, and monthly reports of the company’s expenses. This will give both group and individual spending behavior. The reports will show where the employees exceeded their expenses on their individual type of expense reports such as upper limits of hotels, flights, food, and public transportation. 

It gives insights to the auditing company on where they can pre-book certain events or coupons in bulk beforehand. This will result in less spending on coupons or bulk bookings if more than one employee is traveling together for the particular event. On the safer hand, auditing companies can see what went wrong when things go out of control.

Conclusion

The manual work of keeping track of all your employees in your startup auditing company is a big thing for business travelers and finance teams. There are hours spent on expense calculation, approval, dealing with policy violations, and report submission for maintenance. 

With ExpenseOut, you can streamline expense reimbursements from end to end as it incorporates the key features you will need for the system. You can start using ExpenseOut for Free today. Check out our pricing for more details.

Business consultants are constantly on the move.

They fly frequently, attend expensive dinners with clients, and even spend in multiple currencies. Despite all these unique challenges in managing business travel expenses, the finance teams of consulting firms haven’t evolved past using spreadsheets and processing reimbursements by verifying individual receipts manually.

The challenges of handling expenses manually

When consulting firms’ finance teams’ take it upon themselves to manually process every reimbursement request, they encounter various issues.

• Loss of credibility

As a consulting firm, they are supposed to be highly efficient and fraud-proof. But trusting manual expense processes can lead to a massive loss of time and money along with the possibility of expense fraud, which can damage the reputation of consulting firms.

• Drain on valuable resources

Processing an expense report can take days and tie up valuable resources with tedious jobs that can be easily automated, such as verifying if the reimbursement amount requested is accurate and corresponds with the submitted receipts.

• Drop in employee morale

Consultants who visit clients on-site and stay on the road for months need to know they have their company’s backing. Employees may have to wait weeks to get reimbursed with poor expense management systems, which can affect morale.

• Policy enforcement challenges

Consulting firms often have employee hierarchies that allow ones at the top to access certain privileges, such as business class flights, expensive dinners, etc. When consulting firms depend on manual expense reporting, employees can easily bypass travel expense policy and make the company reimburse them for expenses that are not policy compliant.

• Policy enforcement challenges

The finance team will constantly have expense reports coming in from all sides, and these reports will be in the form of tiring spreadsheets. To make matters worse, consulting firms may find expense reports with receipts in multiple currencies, leading to delays in becoming audit ready.

Why implementing automation in expense management is mission-critical for consulting firms

• You can offer quick and accurate reimbursements across currencies

Even if your employees submit receipts in multiple currencies, good expense management software can automatically convert the values into your local currency and allow you to process reimbursement requests accurately and quickly without wasting time on currency conversions.

• Your employees can report expenses in real-time from anywhere in the world

Your finance team can keep track of employee expenses irrespective of the time difference with automated expense management software. Employees can click a picture of the receipt and upload it to the system. The software automatically prepares a report, allowing the management and the finance team to have 24×7 access to spending details.

• It makes your expense reporting process efficient

With the use of cloud-based expense reporting software, you can reduce the time for reimbursements to minutes. The software is designed to catch duplicate receipts, policy violations, and other issues. Also, you can automatically reimburse expenses and authorize cash advances per company policy, saving you time and resources.

• It helps you enforce company travel policies

If you are an environmentally conscious company, you can ensure your employees are traveling by train, economy class flight tickets, electric vehicles, etc., by making these requirements a part of your travel policy and using AI-based expense management software to only reimburse expenses that comply with your policies.

Besides, you can also ensure your employees are not utilizing company benefits designated for senior employees or top-level management.

• It lets you leverage the power of multi-level approvals

Multi-level approval workflows are incredibly hard to set up manually. They involve countless email chains and spreadsheets with specific permissions, which make the whole process unnecessarily tedious. Using an automated solution to manage your expenses, consulting firms can set up multi-level approval workflows for approving expenses, providing per diems, offering cash advances, etc.

• It integrates with accounting and payroll software

If you have intelligent enough expense management software, it can integrate with your accounting, human resource management software, and payroll software. This integration allows you to be audit ready always and reimburse employees automatically along with their salaries, ridding you of mindless data entry work.

Conclusion

Consulting firms must be on top of their business travel expenses to operate efficiently. Relying on spreadsheets may seem comfortable and familiar. Still, without a doubt, they are holding your firm back by weighing you down with unwanted costs, drops in productivity, and vulnerability to fraud.

Check out our expense management software to ensure your consulting firm can rise above all these issues and operate with minimal business travel costs and associated fraud.

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.