Features to look for in business expense tracker
The outflow of cash for any company will have constant increments as it grows. With this comes the need to track and monitor expenses. Be it for maintaining financial records or for audit purposes, knowing where, why, and how much of your money is being spent on what is important to growth. This is where a business expense tracker comes into play.
What is business expense tracker?
Traditionally, your accountant or finance team members would tally all expense reports and receipts with financial statements manually in a book or on an excel sheet. But it takes a lot of time for manual entry and there is always a chance for human error to occur. A business tracker for expenses on the other hand automatically records expenses in real-time. An expense tracker app is part of a bigger expense management system.
These apps allow financial controllers to have complete visibility of how employees are using their allotted budgets. The way they do this is by being linked to corporate credit cards that are provided to employees. So every time an employee purchases these cards, the transaction is recorded within the expense management software.
Benefits of business expense tracker
Tracking business expenses in real-time saves your finance team a lot of time. This is most effective for small businesses and startups. The value of time saved for these organizations is very crucial to their growth. They need to be extremely agile and quick with their financial decisions, which will ultimately affect the daily operations.
A big advantage of small business expense tracking using an expense tracker app is how easy to use they are. Now while that is not always a given, and highly depends on the provider you are using, it wouldn’t make sense to adopt such a system if it was not easy to use. Every employee can download the app directly on their smartphone and start using it.
Real-time visibility over your expenses will also help rectify any issues immediately and control costs instantaneously instead of waiting till the end of every month to see what is going right or wrong. It improves financial awareness for the founder and the finance team.
At a smaller scale of business, every penny matters for a business. A business expense tracker helps with understanding whether budget forecasting and allotment match up with the reality of how money is being spent.
What to look for in business expense tracker?
Receipt scanning app
A receipt tracker or being able to attach a receipt with every expense that is made using the corporate credit cards is a feature that you should make sure is part of the business expense tracker. Having the ability to do so will save your finance team a lot of time which is spent in collecting, sorting, and matching receipts with expense reports. Giving your employee the ability to directly attach a receipt within an expense claim makes it super simple for financial controllers to carry out the reconciliation process.
Mobile app
Every employee in your company will have a different smartphone. The two major platforms being Android and iOS, you’d want to make sure that the expense tracker you’re using has an app available for both these operating systems. If not, it could cause problems and incur extra costs for your business to get an employee a phone that supports the expense tracker app.
Integrating with accounting software
This is a crucial feature to have for a business expense tracking app. A major reason why expenses need to be tracked is so that they can be entered into the company ledgers. And this can only be done once all expenses are matched and reconciled to be genuine and authentic. If the expense tracker can integrate directly with the accounting software you use, it helps the finance department match and reconcile all expenses faster and sync directly with your company books for accounting purposes.
Sync with credit cards
As mentioned earlier, a business expense tracking app is usually a part of a bigger expense management tool. Part of this ecosystem is corporate credit cards that are provided to every employee to carry out their daily expenses. So a sync with these cards means that each transaction conducted through them is automatically recorded in real-time on the expense management platform as an expense record. This is visible to the employee who made the purchase as well as all the admins of the platform.
Mileage tracking
A mileage expense tracker feature allows employees to claim reimbursements for travel expenses. When an employee has to travel to a place for business purposes using their private vehicle or personal funds, they can claim reimbursements based on the distance traveled. The company can preset an amount per mile. The employee, later on, must submit their receipt and add the miles traveled to claim their reimbursement.
Ease of use
While not a feature, how easy an expense tracker app is to use will surely decide whether your company adopts it or not. Ease of use has many factors such as the learning curve required for employees to use it, how beneficial it is to your finance team, does it actually make the expense management faster, and so on. Depending on your organization’s needs and requirements, choose an expense tracker that will give you the most flexibility and value.
Expense insights
Tracking your company expenses within one platform should give you the ability to monitor and control them. Since your financial controller is the one who will be allotted funds to every department, as an admin you’ll be able to see which team is utilizing their budget and to what degree. You get even deeper expense insights when you’re able to see exactly how much and on what each employee is spending.
Related page: Advantages of using expense management analytics
Track business expenses easily with Volopay
When you choose to onboard with Volopay, you’re not just opting for a business expense tracker, but an entire expense management system. As an admin, you’ll get the ability to assign every team with a certain budget each month and also control how much every employee can spend using their corporate credit card. All the transactions that take place using the physical or virtual Volopay cards get recorded on the platform in real-time giving you complete real-time visibility and keeping things transparent.
Using the expense tracker app, your employees will also get the option to attach their expense receipts directly to these recorded statements using the Volopay app. This way, they won’t have to create expense reports at the end of each month and your finance team will not have to sit and sort through all this data to match and reconcile expenses.
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