Benefits of receipt tracking app for small businesses
Tracking expenses goes a long way towards predicting your future financial status and managing expenses wisely. The foremost step to approach it is starting receipt tracking. Receipt management is a place where even big companies struggle and do their utmost to not get carried away. But with the right accounting tools like receipt tracking apps or spending trackers, it’s achievable.
Only when you track your expenses in real-time, you can identify needless expenses and spend wisely on what you need. Regardless of the size and financial capabilities of your business, it is paramount that you invest time and resources in doing real-time expense management.
What is real-time expense tracking?
Expense tracking is not a monthly or yearly project. To reap the benefits entirely, it should be done in real-time. Real-time expense tracking means you get the data and insights of every money your business spends instantly. Your expenses list grows along with the business. But it doesn't mean that you will be nitpicking over every single detail and handling a humungous load of information.
Real-time tracking apps let you tap into your expense history and pull information associated with it. As the up-to-date data is with you, you can access it anytime, identify the payment source, check for fraudulent activities and save it for later. This data saves your head around the taxation time and audits too.
How does receipt tracking app work?
A receipt tracking app collects receipts automatically or manually, stores them, and keeps track of up-to-the-minute expenses of your business. They offer cloud-based storage solutions to store the records of your day-to-day business payments and grant safe access to a limited number of employees from your company to track those expenses through ocr technology.
A mobile application makes it even easier to upload receipts and access them anytime, anywhere. In short, the receipt tracking app gives a digital format to your receipts, stores them eternally, and lets you access them whenever required.
Benefits of using receipt tracking app
If you are still wondering whether receipt tracking apps are for you or not, read the benefits of this application below. These inputs are from successful small business owners who have used expense trackers for a while.
No more messy paper receipts stored in clumsy cabinets or shoe boxes. You have to take them out, clean them, and organize them based on any order like time, amount, and put them back. And this regular maintenance can be tiring. Not when you have a digital application that does this arrangement for you in any fashion you fancy. You can upload the receipt and let the receipt management app to organize it.
You cannot let the receipts lie around as anyone can get hold of your private information or your clients’. This poses a serious threat and your clients wouldn't be pleased about it too. To guard it with your life, you can trust receipt tracking software as they offer secluded, cloud-based storage with limited access facilities and you don’t have to worry about losing them somewhere or data falling into wrong hands.
It can happen anytime when you suddenly have to get hold of a receipt or need some specific information from them. Hunting through your filing cabinet to find the right one can be quite challenging and confusing. But receipt tracking apps understand this challenge and have multiple search filters and before you know it, you have the right receipt that you were looking for through filters.
A history of your payments can easily tell where you spend the most and offer valuable insights into your spending patterns. You can take advantage of these insights and use them when you create budgets for the coming months. Also, it lets you find out if you have stuck to your budget on a given period or not.
Receipts act as the most accepted proof when it comes to taxation or audit. Your auditor can finish the work in no time when they have every receipt of your business expense.
You can either export and share the files with the auditing team or give them temporary access.
You save a lot of processing time if you are dealing with digital receipts. Manually processing receipts and storing them requires more amount of effort and time. When your business grows quickly, you might even need a separate person to manage this workload and yet things can go wrong as human errors are highly likely to happen here.
How is real-time spend tracking helpful?
In this digital era, is your business catching up with the best and advanced mechanisms to stay on top of everything or stuck with outdated and time-consuming methods? You can determine your business agility by answering the above question. Inculcating spend visibility practices is the best way to start. Here is how expense tracking helps your business.
More control over employee expenses
You spend a considerable amount in reimbursing your employee’s business expenses. But if you have no proof for any of these expenses, you wouldn’t know where the money is exactly spent. What’s worse than this is when there are fraudulent entries by your employees.
Identifying and categorizing employee business travel expenses can be done efficiently when you have a real-time tracking system. This allows your employees to upload their receipts right away through a mobile app. This gets passed towards predefined levels of approvals and only if it passes through, they get their money back.
Insights into duplicate costs
Duplicate invoicing and costs are more prevalent when you process bills manually. This can easily pass off as original and cost your business double the amount of what you owe. When viewed through naked eyes, it can be hard to identify these duplicate payment sources.
However, modern payment systems come with the liberty to pick out duplicate receipts based on their invoice number or any matching information with the original invoice. As the dashboard gives you a more brief view of every processed payment, one can quickly spot duplicate costs and work on the cure.
Reduce fraud risks
Manual calculations cater to errors and misentries. Even a small number change can totally swap the intended entry with something else. And then there are external or internal deceptive activities that are difficult to identify through manual methods.
To avoid risking your hard-earned business money, a real-time expense management application should be there. Fraudulent behaviors account for financial loss as well as hamper trust.
Check into any spend policy violations
Spend policies are a must if you wish to have a close watch over your financial standing. They regulate the debits that go out of our account, set limits on the amount set on each category, and administer travel policies. You are alerted when there is a violation of the spending policies you have established.
With just a few tabs, you can zero in on and find where the thrift has happened. Your expense tracking application makes sure that you adhere to the spending policies formulated based on your financial projections and goals.
Smarter decision making
Real-time expense tracking can also play a role in offering valuable financial insights based on your previous spending habits. Your finance team cannot make informed decisions when there is leaky, incorrect, and unrecorded data mass. An expense tracking application rectifies this and becomes their best friend by organizing the data and extending that with useful analytics.
As the expense ranges are usually dynamic based on various factors, your finance team will have to do hard math in figuring out future business spending. Feeding them with precise data can simplify their work and help them make accurate predictions and planning.
Better supplier evaluation
A substantial share of payments falls under supplier payments. When you have a clear visibility dashboard where you can observe supplier payment trends, you can ensure that they are paid on time.
Additionally, it favors you in identifying whether the initial terms between you and your supplier are still being met. Your relationship with suppliers is equally important to strict adherence to vendor agreements. The ability to look into it comes with umpteen possibilities like saving money, enjoying early payment privileges, etc.
Get real-time expense data with Volopay
From what has been outlined above, a real-time visibility platform should quicken your payment process, provide real-time insights and analytics, and digitize and safeguard your payment information. Volopay’s finance management platform does more than that and takes control of your entire accounting and banking needs. You can pay your bills and invoices and store receipts for future reference. Furthermore, you can schedule payments in advance and do repetitive payments in an automated manner.
The dashboard shows real-time status and analytics visually for you to catch up on. These are handy when it comes to making budgeting decisions and predictions for the future. Speaking of budgets, Volopay grants budgeting liberties to the admin. You can create budgets, assign funds respectively, and if you exceed limits, you are alarmed. This way, you can turn your theoretical budget plan into actionable inputs. If you are looking for convenient payment solutions that will smoothly transition your expense management to the digital world, Volopay is the right choice.
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