One of the greatest assets of every company is its employees. Several factors contribute to a highly successful company, but most, if not all, interconnect with how employees perform their daily tasks. While business owners have a significant influence on their companies, their workforce or the collective effort of their employees pushes the company to overall success.
Integrating systems and processes to make companies more productive and effective in generating profit is one of the classic examples of changes in the company. Yet, in expense management alone, 43% of companies still track their expenses manually. Unfortunately, this means that many companies still need to embrace the ease and convenience of using an expense management system.
This blog is a quick guide to help businesses navigate this challenge and help their employees pick up and use the best expense management software in 2023. So, let’s get started!
Top 3 features of expense management software
Irrespective of your company size or niche, here are some key features you must look for while considering switching or changing your expense management software.
1. Expense tracking
Keeping track of expenses is crucial when developing a budget for your staff, and this feature helps achieve that goal. In addition, using an expense management software helps your employees manage receipts properly. As a result, your company's financial health improves by maintaining a daily record of your employees' expenses and tracking receipts, invoices, and other outgoing costs under a unified dashboard.
Businesses should always ensure employees submit their expense reports with corresponding receipts as a necessary step in remaining compliant. This is because expense receipts are essential for audits and serve as proof of expenditure.
For example, a single expense report from business travel may include several receipts, and receipts can either be paper receipts or electronic receipts. In these situations, it is best to streamline travel expense management to gather, confirm, and document these receipts and reports. Therefore, this is an essential feature in your travel and expense management software.
2. Analytics and reporting
The expense management analytics feature interprets the expenses of your business across employees, departments, cost centers, budgets, and more. Analytics refers to analyzing and gaining helpful insight from your company's financial data. It shows you the trends and movements of the financial status of your company so that you can make sound decisions regarding your financial resources.
Another unique feature that some of the best expense software offer is real-time expense management, which gives you accurate and real-time reporting. This feature helps in employee expense management by monitoring your company's expenses as and when they happen.
3. Automated workflows
Workflows are the series of commercial, administrative, and other tasks and subtasks a process goes through from beginning to end. Expense management workflows are one of the most detailed and stringent because of financial resources and the number of stakeholders involved. Using an expense software to help with this problem increases work productivity, streamlines the whole process into one-click events, and minimizes human error simultaneously.
SUGGESTED READS:
How to automate your expense approval workflows?
Things to consider while designing your expense approval workflow
6 ways to convince your team to use expense management software
Now you know what makes expense management indispensable to an organization. But sometimes, you need more than that to get your team to use the software. So here are some easy ways to convince your team to use it.
1. Show them how easy it is to get reimbursements
Your employees often put in their personal money to get work done. This could be by paying certain bills or swiping their cards for sudden business spending. However, when businesses use traditional expense management means, employees must put in a lot of effort, time, and resources to apply for reimbursements.
But an expense management software changes it all by making the entire process from start to finish streamlined, centralized, and automated. This means that within just a few clicks, employees can easily submit, track and help verify their business expenses, with no back and forth with the Finance teams. Once employees understand and experiment with the system, they will automatically navigate toward it because of its ease of use and simplicity.
2. Help them learn the software
The reality is that only some of your staff are quick learners or adaptive to change. Therefore, some of them need extra help. One of the best ways to teach employee expense management to your staff is to learn it with them. This means that you help them by showing them you are also attempting to understand the expense management app. You can also contact the expense management providers to ask them for help via training, help articles, demos, and such.
3. Use a software with good user experience
There are many options for great expense management systems online. One of the most important factors is their excellent user experience. Aside from showing them the benefits of an expense management system, it would be advantageous to use software that also highlights user experience.
Convincing your employees is showing them the most beneficial expense management app and the most experiential. Check out this best expense management software list, or check out Fyle.
4. Get full buy-in from the team
The truth is that if some of your employees won’t use the software, chances are the whole team will not feel compelled to use it. Therefore, getting full buy-in from the entire team before you endorse change is necessary. You can start by setting up small training sessions and demos to nudge them into the transition.
5. Incentivize usage
Research shows how a solid reward system can help a company run well. Thus, the best way to support and promote a specific behavior is to enforce it positively. One good way to do this is to incentivize software usage. For example, give rewards to people who fully use the software.
But before considering your budget, remember that incentivizing does not have to be monetary. It could be through vouchers, perks, free lunches, or even gift cards.
6. Show appreciation for compliance
A simple appreciation goes a long way, especially to every employee trying their best to embrace change. For example, you can show appreciation to employees who efficiently use your expense software by emailing the whole company.
You can provide certificates to those who have completed the training in using an expense management system. You can even publish a list of successful users or finishers on the company bulletin board or group chat.
Expense management is still on the rise
There are various ways to convince employees to use an expense management system or an expense management app. It is essential to make it fun and rewarding for them and not just show the app's benefits. Make sure you aim for total compliance through small-group training and demo sessions.
Research projects that the expense management software market will be $13.34 billion by 2026. This is a sure sign that more and more companies will integrate the usage of an expense management system. Every year, more business leaders see the benefits of expense management systems. Hopefully, more employees will do that as well.
