Although technology has never been more advanced, it’s normal for your employees to find themselves spending a huge amount of time on burdensome administrative tasks. This is especially true for larger entities, so having an expense tracker for business can empower your organization to reclaim a large portion of their work hours.
With that said, it’s important to understand how expense tracking automation works in order to implement it properly into your business.
In this article, we will go over the reasons why manual tracking is ineffective, and provide tips on how to reduce costs with automated expense tracking.
Administrative Costs Add Up Quickly
There are many factors that reduce efficiency and therefore increase the cost of administrative tasks like time and expense monitoring. This includes:
Manual Processes
Manual expense tracking process consists of recording, managing, and reporting using basic tools. This process can involve a combination of spreadsheets, paper receipts, and manual entry of data, which is then reviewed and evaluated by the proper department.
Manual processes are inherently prone to errors and inconsistencies. Typing mistakes, lost receipts, and mismatched entries can all lead to financial discrepancies and compliance issues. To this, you also have to add integration mistakes that can slow down the entire expense tracking process.
These errors accumulate over time, causing significant problems during audits and financial reviews.
Automated expense tracking software eliminates the need for manual data entry, drastically reducing the chance of errors. By streamlining this type of task, you ensure that your financial data remains accurate and reliable while also ensuring consistency across employee accounts.
Expense tracking automation can bring advantages like:
- Higher accuracy and fewer instances of human error
- Improved compliance rates
- Faster expense reporting process
- Satisfied team members who look forward to business trips
Compliance and Security
Maintaining compliance and ensuring data security are critical aspects of corporate expense tracking. The problem is that manual systems make it difficult to enforce policies consistently, increasing the risk of non-compliance and potential fraud.
Automated systems enhance security by providing robust controls and audit capabilities. They ensure that all expenses align with company policies and regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of irregular activities and protecting sensitive financial data from unauthorized access.
Limited Visibility
Without all-around data, it’s challenging to track spending, identify trends, or make accurate budget projections. This lack of transparency can lead to overspending and financial mismanagement.
Automated expense tracking provides a 360-degree view of all financial activities, including real-time updates and comprehensive reporting capabilities that offer complete transparency, better monitoring, and strategic decision-making.
Expense Tracker for Business: Can It Reduce Administrative Burden?
Time spent on repetitive tasks like expense tracking takes away from activities that generate revenue, which can contribute to significant financial strain in the future.
What’s more, manual tracking may result in mistakes and discrepancies that lead to costly fines.
The solution is a automated time and expense tracking that provides a holistic view of your company resources and enables you to:
Reduce the Need for Manual Processes
Automated expense tracking software drastically reduces the need for manual processes because it can handle tasks like data entry, report generation, and receipt uploading. This has a great effect on your business because your team spends less time on manual tasks and focuses more time on activities that generate revenue.
Receive Real-Time Updates
Automated expense tracking software provides immediate visibility into all transactions, helping managers make budget decisions quickly. At the same time, you can monitor our team’s resources during a project or business event to make sure it has everything it needs to thrive.
Speed Up Approvals
Whether it’s requests for additional resources or expense reimbursements, an expense tracker for your business can help you automate the whole process and ensure employees get responses promptly.
Powerful platforms like DATABASICS Expense tracking can also be configured with different workflows. This means that you can also set up specific responses based on the outcome of the request.
For instance, if an employee’s request was denied because of an error in the request submission, this team member can get an automated response asking them to resubmit the application.
Enforce Company Policies
Businesses often have strict policies and protocols surrounding timesheet and expense tracking. However, if all record-keeping and other processes are manual, it's difficult to ensure that these policies are always observed.
Automated expense tracking systems enforce company policies consistently across all departments.
These platforms flag non-compliant expenses and prevent unauthorized spending as soon as it’s registered. Which, in turn, ensures adherence to your internal protocol and reduces the risk of external policy breaches down the line.
Finding the Best Expense Tracking Automation Solution
Tracking expenses through an automated platform can boost productivity, reduce stress, and improve accuracy across your entire team.
Manual processes, human error, and limited visibility are just some of the factors that can increase your administrative tasks.
Fortunately, platforms like DATABASICS bring everything you need to establish an automated tracking system, keep manual tasks to a minimum, and help increase productivity. Learn more or request a free demo today.
