Imagine just how much time, effort, and money your business could save if it just had a simple centralized expense management dashboard to track, monitor, and report activities to you? 

An expense management dashboard can provide you and your finance team with that convenience. It can collate and analyze key metrics to provide you with clear and comprehensive information. An expense management dashboard also provides a central location to monitor and analyze information collected from multiple sources.

In this article, we discuss why a business should have a central dashboard for its expense management software and the numerous benefits it brings along. Let’s get started!

Why do businesses need a centralized expense management dashboard?

In a T&E management process, there are multiple activities and components involved. All these have to be tracked to analyze business health and productivity. Companies use data collected from their employee T&E reports to come up with an effective strategy. But with a massive amount of expense data, monitoring and analyzing can be challenging.  

• In the absence of a centralized expense management platform, the finance team is unable to interpret multiple datasets. 
• This creates a lot of assumptions on activity status and reports, which can lead to inaccurate data predictions. 
• Especially when all the datasets are scattered, it can be difficult to make a clear sense of what it means, as well. 
• It also becomes easier to miss out on crucial information that can be leveraged to come up with a better financial strategy. 

For instance, if you have a large number of employees making business-related expenses in a month, manually keeping track of expense reports is a hard task. This includes knowing the number of reports submitted, approved, or pending. Having little-to-no clue about the claim reimbursement workflow can create miscommunication and delays. This could further impact employee morale and productivity. 

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Benefits of an expense management dashboard

An expense management dashboard provides you with company T&E information at your fingertips. It collects all the employee expense data from different sources and presents it in a unified form. It tracks all employee spending and gives in-depth analytics, creates informational awareness, and answer questions like, 

• How many employees have reported/ unreported expenses?
• Which category has had the most expenses?
• Are expenses more or less than last month?
• What is the average amount of expenses? And so on.

Below, we discuss the benefits of a centralized expense management dashboard for effectively monitoring and managing your business expenses. 

All your expense records in one place

An expense management dashboard is tailored to report the overall employee expenses. It collates and provides transactional data of all business-related expenses in an aggregated view.

How can an expense management dashboard help with managing expense reports?

• With an automated expense management solution comes a clean and concise dashboard with a summary of expense reports, average expenses, corporate card usage, and more. 
• It gives a detailed breakdown per employee of his/her business expenses. 
• The dashboard also provides the company with tabs to view the status of an activity. 
• Finance teams can also access vendor details, amount, policy violations, etc. within an expense report.

Easy visualization of expense data

Understanding and reading data is made simple with dashboard visualization. The expense management dashboard surfaces necessary details with simple visuals so that an organization can easily make sense of their business expenses. The dashboard’s colorful and simplistic designs can make vital statistics easy to remember. 

For example, let us look at Fyle's dashboard which showcases employee expenses and expense activities to the admin/ approver on logging in. Employee expenses are displayed to the admin in real-time.

Additionally, the expense analytics provided by the dashboard is easy to understand even for non-technical users. 

Pro-tip:

Employee expenses are also synced and updated in real-time and projected in the dashboard. This way, the business can keep up with their financial productivity and health.

A decrease in turnaround time

When the finance team has all the expense data in a centralized location, time spent tracking reports and expenses are cut down. With an automated expense management software the dashboard is fed automatically with data from submitted expense reports. This cuts down both the time and effort in reviewing and approving expense reports. 

How does Fyle's expense management dashboard help streamline your business processes?

• The dashboard reflects the active status of all operations in an expense management workflow. 
• The dashboard provides a clear status of expense reports, payments, cash/trip requests, etc. This makes it easy to track down any open task. 
• Verification and approval of expense reports is done with ease, which helps the finance with accounting as well.
• You can send customized reminders if employees have unsubmitted expense reports. This ensures timely expense report submissions. 
• With insight into the trends, the finance team can then take strategic approaches to curb extra time and effort spent in any of the processes.

Understand your employee expense trends

You can access overall, and category-specific insights from all the information collected from your employee expenses under one centralized dashboard. This helps You can access overall, and category-specific insights from all the information collected from your employee expenses under one centralized dashboard. This helps businesses make better sense of the summarized dataset.

How can a business benefit from data analytics? 

• The finance team can identify top spenders, violators, and expense trends of every employee with real-time data analytics.
• By filtering through days, months, weeks, or years of past financial history, the company can view average spendings. 
• The finance and accounting teams can identify and take corrective measures on non-compliance and fraudulent behavior.
• The company can view expense trends within a specific time frame. 
• The company can gauge how effective are the set travel and expense policies.

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In conclusion

Dashboards are a convenient way to track, manage, and view your company expenses and T&E management operations. It pulls data from multiple sources to surface relevant information. It thus provides a summarized output that can be used to make financial decisions and strategies. 

An expense management dashboard is simple and easy to use, as well. See it for yourself by scheduling a demo today with Fyle!