5 Signs That Say You’re Ready For Expense Tracking Software

Your company’s first investment likely wasn’t business expense management software. However, oftentimes, new businesses hyper-focus on sales, considering only accounting several years after everything gets settled which leaves accounting with a mountain of paper to dig through and years of back taxes and expense reporting to reconcile.

It’s easy to get comfortable with your routine and doing things in a certain way, and introducing change is a tough sell. This is especially true when it comes to applying new software platforms or applications.  Expense tracking is an important aspect of any business and an expense tracking platform that also acts as an expense tracking app that can totally transform it!  Yet, we know it’s not always obvious when this solution is needed, so we’ve put together a list of warning signs to be aware of.  If your business is experiencing any of them, it’s time to upgrade your expense management process.

1. BURIED IN PAPER  

Manual expense management processes are notorious for involving a mountain of paperwork.  Employees need to save paper receipts for every expense while on the road or traveling.  These receipts are usually attached to a reimbursement form and submitted to accounts payable. Instead of wasting time, money, and killing trees a proper business expense tracking software stores everything in the cloud.  Organizing and backing it all up digitally, to make everyone’s life easier should there ever be a dreaded audit later on.

2. ACCOUNTING COMPLAINTS

According to the Project Management Institute, $122 million of every $1 billion invested in a project is wasted on poor performance. Instead of wasting time and money addressing employee complaints, accounting should focus on cost-saving strategies. Tracking expenses and receipts provide analytic that offer insights to where every dollar is going. Running such reports, eliminate non-essential spending and saves money in the long-term.

3. T&E POLICY IS NOT CLEAR 

Businesses lose nearly $3 billion a year to expense fraud, and that doesn’t account for unintentionally mistakes due to the process not being made clear.  Your T&E policy can be programmed into a smart receipts app to ensure that no mistakes are made making fraud impossible. The Fingercheck Expense Tracking App can auto-categorize expenses and assign recurring ones to make things easier.  With this system like this in place, your business will no longer lose money to costly mistakes.

4. ACCOUNTS PAYABLE IS ALWAYS BEHIND  

The manual process is by nature, is slow and it can be overwhelming for accounts payable to process everything on time. It’s quite likely your accounting team will be constantly trying to catch up on expense reporting and find it difficult to work on other projects. It’s exhausting.   You may be tempted to hire more employees, but that’s not fixing the problem.  This is when automation comes in. The best applications for tracking expenses and receipts have algorithms that allow your staff to complete most (if not all) the work they used to for a fraction of the cost it will take to hire more people.

5. TIME SPENT FIXING ERRORS  

When errors are made in business, it can be a hellish experience to correct.  Most of the time someone has to redo all the work to ensure properly rectified.  This means every mistake takes twice the work, twice the time all while pulling you away from other tasks. As mistakes pile up, the workload increases and the business never move forward.

Automating expense reporting makes mistakes far less likely to occur. Automated business expense tracking tools free up valuable resources that can be focused on more important things like generating a profit and implementing cost-saving measures. If your business is spending too much time fixing mistakes, it’s time to start automating manual processes