It costs more to borrow money now than in the past twenty years with the Bank of England’s base rate remaining high. If you’re a financial leader, one thing is certain: this is the time to improve poor spending practices that may be negatively impacting your bottom line.
You know the ones.
Each repetitive, manual process that keeps your finance team bogged down. Everything from sorting through piles of receipts, employee expense reports, and invoices to typing spend data into spreadsheets.
Manual processes aren’t just slowing you down. They put the organisation at more risk of manual errors, expense fraud, making it harder to ensure full compliance with HMRC regulations.
What are ways you can gain more visibility and control over spending?
For starters, it’s time to ditch those manual processes and take steps towards implementing an expense management solution. A powerful expense management solution streamlines your team’s workflow for submitting and reviewing business expenditures. Helping you control expenses, increase visibility for informed decision-making, and boost employee productivity.
Moving to a more robust expense management process isn’t as overwhelming as you may think. Let’s break it down step by step:
Employee expenses
- Legacy process: Mainly a manual process, with some use of technology, such as scanning and emailing receipts for approval.
- Where to start: Deploy expense management software for capturing and processing employee spend information while ensuring compliance with HMRC expense guidelines.
- Automated expense management: A fully automated, near real-time experience from purchase to reimbursement.
Travel booking
- Legacy process: Employees book travel on consumer sites with little oversight and pay for it with a personal credit card.
- Where to start: Use a travel management solution, company, or booking tool that enforces travel policy.
- Automated expense management: A holistic approach to capturing, analysing, and controlling travel spending that uses travel data to negotiate vendor-supplier relationships. Travel booked on pre-issued, pre-approved virtual cards with spending limits.
Invoices
- Legacy process: Mainly manual invoice processing, with some use of technology, such as scanning and emailing invoices for approval.
- Where to start: Leverage an AP automation solution with OCR technology for submitting and approving invoices online while ensuring invoices are VAT-compliant.
- Automated expense management: Fully automated invoice processing, from remittance to reconciliation, with a complete view of all invoices.
Payments
- Legacy process: Bacs and cheque payments, with paper cheques physically mailed.
- Where to start: Moving payments from cheque to faster payments or bacs transfers, eliminating the need for manual cheque runs.
- Automated expense management: Full control over payment timing, using virtual cards to take advantage of discounts and rebates.
Spend control compliance
- Legacy process: Vague spend management policies that are arbitrary and hard to enforce.
- Where to start: Configuring spend policies into the expense and AP automation solutions to align with UK compliance and auditing standards.
- Automated expense management: Built-in machine learning capability with targeted review by independent auditors, to eliminate all out-of-policy spending.
Insight and analytics
- Legacy process: Siloed data trapped in disparate systems, making manual analysis cumbersome and inaccurate.
- Where to start: Basic report creation with limited high-level analytics dashboard capabilities.
- Automated expense management: Tailored analytics capabilities, enabling strategic decision-making based on data rather than intuition.
In today’s economy, your finance team can’t afford to rely on legacy processes that lack visibility and spend control.
By embracing expense management automation, you can free your finance team from mundane tasks. Effective spend control enables them to focus instead on strategic initiatives that protect the bottom line.
Learn how Harvard Business Review recommends finance teams revolutionise the use of automation to drive growth and profitability.