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Today, many aspects of managing the workplace have been digitized.
In fact, 91% of businesses worldwide are engaged in some form of digital initiative. Digitalization can help keep the workplace neat and the employees more productive. It's because you don't need to keep everything in bulky folders, where every invoice or document has to be organized.
Automating receipt management might be especially important for SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) because they are often understaffed. SMB employees also fill multiple roles simultaneously. Increasing productivity through reducing redundant tasks is a priority in such cases.
If you need help with tracking business records and expenses, it's time to invest in receipt management software. It helps businesses in the tedious expense management process by storing every receipt in one place. It also helps your employees focus on the tasks that are crucial to meeting team and, ultimately, business goals.
Automated Receipt Management is made possible by receipt scanning apps. These are applications that allow the capturing of images of receipts and expense tracking. They are often mobile apps. You can easily take a picture of the receipt, add it to the database, and categorize it.
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Usually, the receipt scanner app automatically adds the data to your accounting software without requiring manual entry. You can also quickly search for these "smart receipts" in the app with keywords and filters.
The ease of use and a reduction in paperwork are just a few benefits of receipt management apps. Below, we go into more detail about the specific advantages of automated receipt management through receipt tracking software:
Inaccurate data can reduce productivity in the workplace. Poor-quality data can cost U.S. companies $3 trillion every year.
But how do you get inaccurate data? People are prone to errors. When you give them more work than they can handle, the chances of them committing mistakes increase, too. So, when your accountants manually check hundreds of expense receipts, for example, the chances of generating inaccurate data are high.
Because the scanning app uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition), it can automatically extract meaningful information from the receipt. The result is that it can reduce the number of errors and workload of entering data by hand. You can upload a file or take a photo to add the expense to the app. The software usually has a drag-and-drop interface where you can upload your receipts in bulk.
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Automated receipt management tools also make it easier to accurately estimate expenses and track the amounts spent by employees on behalf of the company.
For example, receipt scanners can make mileage tracking much more accurate. Employees can scan a receipt and add it to the app immediately when on the road. Some receipt management tools even have a built-in function for managing mileage tracking. Check out the example below:
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Some tools can also automatically import receipts from services like Uber and Airbnb. Additionally, these tools can import expenses automatically from the employee’s company credit card. Since all these are automated processes, the chances of inaccurate data input are reduced.
Receipt scanners can create a foolproof digital filing system where every expense is tracked and documented. In addition, all receipts are centralized and securely stored. So, your accounting department can search for any receipt or expense based on employee parameters like amount, date of spend, level, department, and other filters.
In other words, automated receipt management can help your accounting department find precisely what they’re looking for in seconds. They don’t have to go through paper files.
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By automating the receipt management process, the accounting department can also significantly reduce the time it takes to track expenses and maintain financial records. Receipt management software can help them do this through proper process automation. Receipt scanning apps can provide real-time data on expenses, allowing them to quickly and easily monitor the business’ financial status.
Some apps also allow for the customization of approval workflows or give the authority to approve the expenses on behalf of other employees. To use the app, employees just need to register and go through email verification by the admin. Then they can use the app to send images of the receipts anywhere. This can significantly speed up management approval of business expenses.
One of the most significant benefits of receipt scanners is improved record-keeping. Receipt management automation ensures you can accurately record employee expenses, reducing the likelihood of errors that can lead to financial mismanagement.
Receipt management tools also provide businesses like yours with increased financial control. By tracking receipts and expenses in real-time, you can identify areas where there’s overspending and make necessary adjustments to the budget.
Some receipt applications can also give you tips for tax deductions, which can help your business increase profits and marginalize expenses. Ultimately, you can create a report detailing your action to improve your business finances. An outline generator can help you make the skeleton of your report. So, if you need to upload the full report on your website for transparency, it will be easily found because it’s SEO-optimized.
Furthermore, automated systems allow businesses to set spending limits such as per diem, providing greater control over company finances. The app can also help set alerts if there is overspending.
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Receipt scanners can also lead to improved cash flow management. By providing real-time data on expenses, you can ensure the business has enough cash to cover costs and avoid unnecessary late fees or interest charges.
Additionally, by accurately tracking expenses, you can make more informed decisions regarding cash flow management, such as when to invest or take on additional debt.
Every business wants its employees to be time-efficient and focused on their most important tasks. Unfortunately, manually inputting data from receipts is a time-consuming process. It can often take up valuable time that could be used for other essential tasks.
With the app, employees (those who aren't part of management or your accounting department) can scan receipts and create expense reports automatically based on the captured information, such as invoice number, vendor details, GSTIN, etc. This is data the tool automatically adds to the accounting software.
Moreover, employees can save time filing expense claims. Some apps provide multiple templates to make it easier for employees to create these. These templates can be customized to fit the organization's specific needs, streamlining the reporting process. With the tool, employees don't need to collect and keep paper receipts. Also, they don't need to enter receipt data by hand.
In summary, receipt management apps increase employees' productivity by automating the receipt data entry process. This also helps reduce the risk of errors.
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A receipt management software provides increased security for businesses. By digitizing receipts, companies can avoid the risk of lost or damaged paper receipts, which can be a severe security risk. Digital receipts are also encrypted and stored securely, ensuring that sensitive financial data remains confidential.
Moreover, automated systems provide greater control over who has access to financial records. This helps reduce the risk of data breaches and cyber-attacks.
Receipt management process automation can also provide improved data backup and disaster recovery capabilities. By storing digital receipts in the cloud, businesses can ensure that their financial records are backed up. This provides peace of mind and can reduce the costs of recovering lost financial data.
Additionally, automated receipt management can help businesses comply with regulatory requirements. By accurately tracking expenses and maintaining detailed financial records, companies can ensure that they comply with tax laws and other financial regulations.
In some apps, businesses can even set up policies for approving receipts. For example, they can configure complex business rules and check every receipt before it is even submitted for approval.
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Using receipt software can help businesses avoid costly fines and penalties. It also helps provide greater transparency to stakeholders.
Automated receipt management is a valuable tool that can bring numerous benefits for businesses. By streamlining the receipt management process, companies can save valuable time, improve accuracy, increase productivity, and ultimately succeed.
These systems can provide businesses with real-time data on expenses, improving financial control and cash flow management. They also improve record-keeping, ensuring businesses stay compliant with regulatory requirements. They also protect against potential data privacy and security breaches.
Additionally, automated receipt management frees up time for employees to focus on other vital tasks. This helps increase their productivity.
It's clear that automated receipt management is a worthwhile investment for any business–whether small or big–-looking to improve its financial management practices.
One of the major challenges in expense management is to ensure that your employees track and submit their expenses on time. The new Fyle app for Slack is built to enable your employees and Finance team to manage expenses without leaving the platform. You can track expenses, reconcile credit card spend in real-time, be notified of the status of your reports, and approve reports on the go.
You can install the Fyle app from the Slack App Directory and click on the "Add to Slack" button. Then, allow Fyle to access the Slack workspace. You can start submitting expenses quickly by simply calling a slash command (/expense-form) or visiting the Fyle app.
One of the ways employees can create an expense with the Fyle Slack App is by uploading the e-receipt into the Fyle Slack app. Fyle will scan the receipt, extract the details, and auto-fills the expense form without any manual intervention.
Another way of creating expenses is by using the expense form. You can call the expense form by typing “/expense-form”. The expense form captures the following details - Currency, Amount, Purpose, Merchant, Date of Spend, Category, Project, and whether the expense is Reimbursable. Once submitted, these expenses can be tracked on the Web app or Mobile app, added to a report, edited, or deleted.
They can also submit receipts to the expense by clicking on the "Attach Receipt" button and uploading the receipts to the same thread.
Fyle's new integration with Visa brings real-time card feeds to any Visa-powered credit card (soon expanding to other payment networks). So when an employee makes a payment with their credit card, they are instantly notified of the spend on Slack.
All they have to do is attach an image of the receipt, and Fyle will match it automatically. This leads to transactions being reconciled on time with only a few clicks.
Later, you can go to your Fyle account to review the expense and submit it in an expense report.
Employees are informed of any change in status with their expense report. Fyle sends a notification whenever their expense reports are submitted, approved, sent back, or processed for payment. This eliminates a lot of back and forth between the employees and the Finance team, while ensuring transparency.
With this integration, reviewing and approving reports becomes easy too! When an employee submits an expense report, Fyle instantly notifies their approver. The approvers can choose to either review the report right from Slack or do it in Fyle. In Slack, they can take a quick glance at all the details like the amount, date of spend, purpose and if the receipt is attached.
Once the approver is done reviewing the report, they can approve or send it back without leaving Slack.
Fyle works where your employees work, so they don't have to spend time learning how to use Fyle to manage expenses. If you'd like to see Fyle in action, please feel free to schedule a demo with us and learn why it's time for you to switch.
Let's start with this. Corporate travel is not like it is portrayed in the movies. Many corporate travelers who regularly travel for work know there is much more to it than just packing their bags and jetting off.
From start to end, the entire corporate travel management process can be a tiring and time-consuming ordeal for everyone involved. How? Let's break it down.
Imagine doing all the above tasks with a manual system! If your business goes about these processes with traditional means, it will result in wasted time and effort and open doors for errors and potential fraud. This could be detrimental to the financial health of your business.
This is where a travel and expense management software comes into play. The software eliminates all the undue stress and headache that comes with your T&E process and automates and streamlines the entire process from pre-trip to post-trip reimbursements while ensuring visibility and transparency throughout.
Are you interested to learn more about how a T&E software can benefit your organization and employees? If yes, this is the ultimate 2022 guide to helping you pick the best travel and expense software that fits your business needs. Let's get started!
A travel and expense management software is designed to automate, simplify and streamline travel and expense management for businesses of all sizes. In addition, most travel and expense management software are device-agnostic, which means traveling employees can access the software using any device and keep track of their expenses. Thus, it is safe to say the software is built to do the heavy lifting for both your Finance teams and employees, freeing up time for them to go about other important tasks.
The software can also:
Using the software, Finance teams can also have complete visibility and control over all business expenses across departments, cost centers, and more. As a result, they can also identify cost-saving opportunities and optimize costs wherever necessary.
The travel and expense management process requires numerous stakeholders to work in sync to get the job done. As a result, there are many moving parts when it comes to streamlining the entire process.
Below, we have compiled a list of pain points that businesses with a broken T&E process face. If you relate to any of the challenges below, maybe it's time for your organization to consider switching to a travel and expense software.
Reimbursement delays can occur due to several reasons. It can be due to:
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An over-reliance on people to be actively engaged with their expense reporting and management duties can cause a choke-hold in the process. When companies use offline tools for things like approvals, the entire process is at a standstill because they need the manager's approval, and he/she might be unavailable to take action immediately.
Let's say a travel manager needs to book a flight for an employee. And his current travel booking method or tool has no connection to the company accounts. He now has to go through multiple tools, software, and possibly agents before he finally completes the task. At the same time, he has to keep going back and forth between the approvers and the travelers so that everything is under the company guidelines.
This decentralization is another cause for creating a bottleneck in travel booking. The dependencies on these outdated approval processes can cause substantial damage to your cash flow and also your employee's morale.
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If you're still incorporating spreadsheet and Excel-based reporting in your expense workflows, it can pose a threat to your financial health in the long run. Additionally, relying on outdated methods means:
Having unclear T&E policies can impact business spending later on. Here's how.
One of the biggest challenges organizations face is figuring out what their company is spending on and missing out on.
Simple spreadsheets don't provide enough, as they are singular data points that have difficulty showing their connection with everything else. An organization needs a solution where an individual can view how all types of expenses interact and affect each other. This is one of the critical areas an automated expense management software can help.
An automated T&E software comes equipped with features that help track all expenses and allows users to view detailed reports and the status of expense reports in the reimbursement cycle. With all the expense data coming under one travel and expense management dashboard, Finance teams can view spending trends and patterns based on real-time insights. As a result, they can make informed decisions and develop a solid financial plan by leveraging their company expense data.
With a travel and expense management software like Fyle, corporate travel can be as simple as the image shown above. Fyle covers all your travel requirements, from pre-trip arrangements to employee expense reimbursements.
Some of the common features and benefits of an ideal travel and expense management software are:
Corporate travel booking can become tedious if your Finance team has to go back and forth with your employees and travel managers. This is because, even after making the bookings, Finance teams still have to manually collect and consolidate the details into their system.
But with an T&E management software that offers integration with a corporate travel booking platform, Finance teams can have tighter control and visibility into the travel expenses. They can also reduce the unnecessary back and forth and eliminate manual data entry work.
Additionally, with expense management automation, employees need to simply fill in the necessary details and make travel bookings before a trip. The reimbursable expenses get automatically created in the travel and expense software, and they can simply send the trip report for review. Finance teams can also review and approve trip reports right from their T&E software. With all the travel-related details under one platform, Finance teams can easily access, view, and draw valuable insights from the reconciled travel expense data.
While on a business trip, the last thing your employees should be worried about is missing receipts or losing track of their expenses. Having a device-agnostic travel expense management software can help traveling employees track their expenses right from their mobile phones.
Additionally, a travel expense software like Fyle offers multiple ways to track employee expenses and receipts.
Duplicate claims, data entry errors, and missing receipts are just a few policy violations that can pass unnoticed if your Finance teams are not thorough with their reviews. But checking for T&E policy violations on all employee expense reports can not only be tedious but also consume a lot of valuable working hours.
But thanks to the real-time policy check feature available in a T&E software, Finance teams can have tighter control over their expense limits, rules, and guidelines. They can also configure the software as per their T&E policy to guarantee no policy violations get by. This ensures any errors or anomalies in an expense report are corrected before the employee even submits it.
Your employee travel expense reports hold a lot of information to help your Finance teams gain better insight into your company’s business travel spending and trends. But if you are managing your travel data manually or using an age-old solution, it can be a painful task to compile and make sense of all the data.
A travel and expense management software not only helps store all your employee travel bookings and expenses under one platform but also helps Finance teams make better data-backed business decisions. Using the data analytics feature available on Fyle, Finance teams can toggle and see information like their top spenders, spend by project/department, top category spend, and more. This ensures they always stay on top of all things business expenses.
Using a T&E management software, your Finance team can ensure speedy payments to employees and close the reimbursement cycle on time. Fyle comes equipped with the next-day ACH feature that can streamline your reimbursement process and help you track the statuses of each payment in real-time. Plus, with Fyle’s single click reimbursement feature, your Finance team can make payments to employees in bulk saving time and increasing productivity in the process.
If you search for the term "travel and expense management software, " several TEM software will probably pop up on your search browser. However, if you're looking to invest in the tool, you probably want something to help you scale and streamline the process seamlessly.
The ideal expense software should be flexible and have configurable features, with plans and packages tailored according to your company size and needs. Thus, while choosing the tool, you'd ideally want to stick with a software that you and your employees can use for the long term. An easy way to start is by considering the current challenges your employees and teams face and how the tool can solve them.
No matter why you're looking to switch to a T&E management software, the right software is the one that can match all your needs.
Source: G2
The potential travel management software shouldn't make you break your bank. The best options are those reasonably priced tools that still offer features necessary for you to simplify your T&E management process.
At Fyle, we make sure we charge only for users who create at least one expense report in a month. We call them active users.
Like most software subscription tools, our travel and expense management software has three different service tiers that you can choose from to meet your requirements.
You can choose to pay for the plans either monthly or annually.
You can choose the subscription package based on your budget, expected usage, and active users.
Our travel and expense management software is built to simplify business travel bookings and expense management. At Fyle, we understand the pain points of T&E and aim to create a tool that’s user-friendly, intuitive, and can be accessed from anywhere, anytime, and by using any device. Our Fyle app is available as a web app and is also available for Android and iOS devices.
We also come with a best-in-class customer support team that is available 24/7 with a turnaround time of less than 4 hours to help your team with any changes, travel emergencies, and questions you may have. With Fyle, stay rest assured that your travel manager, employees, and Finance teams always stay on track.
Check out what our customers have to say about us here. Additionally, if you’re interested to see our product in action, feel free to schedule a demo with us!
Are you paying attention to your corporate travel and expense management?
You should. Because according to GBTA (Global Business Travel Association), annual corporate travel spending will reach $1.4 trillion by 2024.
If you are struggling with your travel and expense management due to your manual setup, it’s time to take a step towards digitization. This is because if you leave your expense management woes unattended, it can significantly impact the growth and scale of your business in the long run.
This article highlights some of the top corporate T&E challenges and how businesses can embrace corporate T&E software to make expense management less frustrating.
As a necessary means of staying compliant, businesses should always ensure employees submit their expense reports with corresponding receipts. This is because expense receipts serve as proof of spending and are crucial during audits. Receipts may either be paper receipts or e-receipts, and a single expense report can often come with multiple receipts. In these cases, the onus of collating, verifying, and documenting these receipts and reports would fall entirely on the Finance teams.
While some businesses believe using expense report templates may solve the problem, the truth may vary. With templates, employees are to manually enter expense details and attach photocopies of receipts as proof of spending. This may result in receipts all over the place and in varying formats.
To add to the confusion, these templatized expense reports make it easy for missing, incorrect, and exaggerated entries to slip by. In these cases, Finance teams are to manually identify and address issues with multiple employees over multiple expenses. Further, all clarifications and justifications for these business expenses go unrecorded as they happen over emails, calls, or word of mouth. This translates to zero clarity and a highly ineffective means of managing business expenses and receipts.
How can a travel and expense management software help manage receipts?
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Is your travel and expense policy clear and comprehensive? Is it easy to understand and document every step of your travel reimbursement process in detail? If not, then the chances are that it may be contributing to employee expense reporting frustration and poor reimbursement turnaround time.
Unclear T&E guidelines can lead to policy violations, out-of-policy expense claims, and finance teams spending more time going back and forth with confused and frustrated employees. This translates into productive time wasted over something that could have been curbed from the beginning.
Your travel and expense policies work as your one source of truth when it comes to employee reimbursements. Unfortunately, most companies pay no heed to their policies, and as a result, so do their employees. This results in out-of-policy expenses and other policy violations, which cause unnecessary financial leaks in the system.
How can a travel and expense management software help enforce policies?
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Expense management tasks can be frustrating for both employees and Finance teams. For example, employees need to keep a tab of their travel expenses and correctly enter all the information into an expense report template to be reimbursed on time.
After employees submit their T&E reports, Finance teams need to collate all the trip reports from managers and manually identify claims that are not supported by your travel and expense guidelines. Then, in case of a policy violation, the Finance team needs to send back the travel report to the employee in whole or in part for necessary changes or clarification.
This can translate into a costly and time-consuming process. Additionally, due to stringent timelines, they may not thoroughly verify the submitted expense reports and may end up missing claims that might be fraudulent in nature. This behavior over prolonged periods can prove detrimental to the financial health of your business.
How can a travel and expense management software help review and approve expense reports?
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Insight into expense trends occurs when Finance teams have historical and real-time data in hand. But, businesses who use traditional expense management means gain little to no insight as they have no data to refer back to. As a result, you can end up making ill-informed business decisions.
Expense analytics and real-time insight into expense data play an important role in cost optimizations and preventing financial leaks in the system. But, this can happen only when businesses have the numbers to speak for them.
How can a travel and expense management software help with spend insight?
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Delayed reimbursements in a manual travel and expense management setup can be due to a number of reasons. It can be because of:
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The business world is continuously evolving to become highly receptive to the needs of employees. While the choice to automate your travel and expense management software may benefit you as a business, it also is a boon for your employees. Addressing employee challenges has a direct impact on employee morale and productivity. Thus, also impacting the overall financial productivity of your business.
All this and more without your Finance team slogging it out.
Do you want to hop onto the bandwagon of digital change? Fyle does more than just expense reporting. Schedule a demo today to witness how Fyle helps you put an end to your expense management woes.
Only people who have dealt with a travel expense report know business travel doesn’t always mean business class flights and fancy restaurants.
Employees, managers, travel managers, and Finance teams juggle with multiple things to ensure business trip expenses are within the specified budget and comply with the travel and expense policy laid out by the company.
A travel expense software makes management of per diems, trip budgets, mileage, and trip expense reports easy for all the stakeholders involved. In this article, we list the top reasons why businesses should switch to a travel expense software to manage business travel expenses.
A travel expense software helps employees and managers streamline and automate all business travel-related expenses like cash advances, hotels, flight bookings, per diems, and employee travel reimbursements.
A modern travel expense software also helps Finance teams gain real-time visibility and complete control over business expenses. Read on to understand how your business can benefit from a travel expense software.
Business travel is not all fun. It requires stakeholders to do a host of research and work even before the business trip.
Additionally, there is a high chance of non-compliance or even deliberate expense report fraud in case:
This is where a travel expense software can help.
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Travel expense management is a complicated process for employees, managers, and finance teams alike. It involves hours of either manual entry and compilation of expense receipts and expense reports or manual verification and approval of submitted business expenses.
A travel expense software helps cut costs, save time, and provide valuable insight into expense data that can be used to further streamline your organization’s corporate travel management. Let’s dive deeper.
Problem: Travel expenses occur even before the trip does. Therefore, employees are issued cash advances for travel and accommodation bookings.
Travel bookings are generally either done by the traveler (employee) or the travel manager. In either case, your employees, manager/approver, and travel manager must understand your travel and expense policy, preferred vendors, and budget allocations. Additionally, the travel booking preferences and booking confirmation back-and-forths, all happen during billable hours.
Solution: A travel expense software automates this process and allows the employee to directly raise trip requests and submit a list of preferred vendors to the travel manager. This can then be forwarded to travel vendors for booking.
Once the details are in place, the vendor sends the trip request back to the approver/traveler for confirmation. Travel bookings can be confirmed immediately on approval.
Fyle offers 360-degree trip reports that bring all business expenses incurred for a particular business trip/project under one single trip report.
SUGGESTED READ: How to use Fyle as a travel approval software
Problem: Traditionally, traveling employees save receipts for all business expenses so they can fyle for travel reimbursement post-trip.
Safekeeping of receipts, ensuring expense policy compliance, and submitting the expense report on time is much unproductive work for your globe-trotting employees. This can be especially hard in case of sudden changes in the itinerary.
Solution: A travel expense software makes it easy for employees to track, scan, and save business expense receipts - from wherever and whenever.
Once the trip is finished, your employees can submit their travel expense reports with just a click. The ease that an expense reporting software brings to traveling employees saves them a lot of frustration, time, and hours.
Fyle allows employees to send business expenses to expense reports from within everyday apps like G-Suite, Outlook, WhatsApp, text message, slack, and many more.
SUGGESTED READ: Five ways to make expense reporting easier for employees
Problem: One can not always be expected to remember the nuances of their company’s corporate travel and expense policy.
Employees can sometimes forget what expenses qualify as business expenses or spending limits, and managers or Finance teams may sometimes miss fraudulent or out-of-policy expenses. This puts the organization and the traveler at risk with the tax authorities.
Solution: A travel expense software comes with a robust policy engine that detects and prevents any non-compliant expenses from even being claimed.
In cases where the employee submits an expense despite automatic flagging, the expense is sent to a reviewer to validate the expense. This prevents any fraudulent expenses from being fyled.
Fyle’s policy engine automates and enforces policies on anything your organization might need. It also maintains a digital audit trail that helps track actions taken on every single expense.
SUGGESTED READ: Check expense report frauds with Fyle
Problem: Finance teams are tasked with manually verifying receipts with expense claims, ensuring expense policy compliance, and processing travel reimbursements.
In cases of non-compliant expenses, the report is sent back to the traveler for rectification or justification. Finance teams also have to check and weed out out-of-policy expenses, or fraudulent expense claims. This time-consuming task ultimately results in delayed travel reimbursement, which takes a hit on employee morale.
Solution: A travel expense software ensures real-time policy compliance by raising flags for any non-compliant expenses or expense reports at the source of expense creation itself. This allows travelers to rectify errors without the Finance team having to chase them. This saves a lot of time and effort for all the stakeholders involved in the process.
Also, when it comes to travel booking research or employee travel reimbursements a travel expense software automates the entire process of travel expense reporting while ensuring real-time expense policy compliance and audit readiness.
Further, a T&E software allows approvers to initiate multiple transactions to different employee bank accounts from the centralized expense management dashboard.
Fyle’s travel reimbursement features allow approvers and Finance teams to track the transaction status of any expense reimbursement right from the dashboard. This allows for an overall view of all business expenses that can help Finance teams gain sight of the larger picture.
SUGGESTED READ: Balancing expense policy compliance and happy employees
Here’s a list of excellent reasons why you should consider Fyle as your travel and expense management software:
Fyle’s innovative and employee-friendly expense reporting features make travel and expense management a breeze! In the words of the folks at IDC,
“Fyle is intelligent, employee-centric, scalable, and delivers significant value to growing businesses without any impact on user experience and quality of support.”
Ready to upgrade your T&E management? Schedule a demo with us today!
Post COVID-19, businesses have seen a massive surge in credit card transactions for incoming and outgoing payments. While this made the payment process easier, it also meant a looming nightmare for finance teams at the end of every month – reconciling credit card expenses.
But where do business owners and finance teams start regarding business credit card management?
This blog discusses everything you need to know about credit card reconciliation, how it works, and why it’s crucial for businesses in 2022. We’ll also address some challenges accounting and finance teams face with reconciliation, after which we’ll give you the easiest way to solve your reconciliation woes. Let’s dive in!
Credit card reconciliation is the process by which accountants ensure that the transactions in a business’s credit card statement match its general ledger. For accurate and efficient financial reporting, companies need to know that these transactions took place and that the expenses on both sides are correct and valid.
If done manually, accountants sit and compare an organization’s credit card statement against its general ledger. If every payment on both sides matches, they can determine that the ledger was recorded correctly and can close books for the month.
However, if there are discrepancies, the responsibility of clarifying these values would fall on the financial controller. They need to find out who made the additional payments manually.
The reconciliation process typically occurs at the end of every month, while a more significant financial closing happens towards the end of each quarter or financial year.
As mentioned earlier, a credit card transaction can impact two sections of your business finance: income and expenses. This means companies will have two types of reconciliations:
This would include all your business expenses – payments your organization makes for goods or services. For example, if your business is habitually issuing cards to its employees, they must be reconciled individually.
This would include all your incoming payments. Reconciling these transactions takes a little more effort than your outgoing payments, but there are defined ways to make this easier.
In this blog, we’ll only be looking in detail at the business expenses side; that is, transactions made by you or your employees to purchase goods or services for your organization.
Making a payment for your credit card statement without a second glance may not be the wisest thing to do. Big financial institutions make mistakes too, and it can end up costing you a lot more than what you should be paying.
The reconciliation process starts when a business receives statements for its expenses. The expense details are then manually matched with the company's internal finance records and checked for discrepancies.
This process ensures:
Reconciliation, as we know, involves the process of matching expenses with your internal finance record. But how do you go about the entire process?
Receipts are proof of expenses. It comes in several forms and helps account for money spent. For example, a purchase made using a credit card comes with an invoice given to the customer at the time of sale. These receipts should be collected from all the cardholders and stored for future reference.
Companies ideally use T&E expense reports to collect and store employee receipts. This can be done manually using paper-based excel sheets and reports or by automation-driven tools like an expense management software.
Finance teams should match credit card statements to reported business expenses with the receipts. Businesses can do this with the help of any preferred system for reconciling.
Pro tip: Ensure that other than fees and interest charges, there shouldn't be any other unmarked items in the credit card statement.
There are always chances of error, either with or without intention. Thus, your finance teams need to be careful in identifying and notifying the bank authorities in cases of mistakes. In addition, ensure timely action by reporting any unauthorized activities or fraudulent behavior.
Some examples of commonly occurring errors with business credit card reconciliations are:
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Most companies reconcile credit card expenses with paper-based and spreadsheet-driven methods. Unfortunately, this process is inefficient and forces employees to work long hours of manual labor. This also results in more inefficiencies and loopholes in the process. Given below are some challenges that can hinder your finance team's progress:
For employees, reconciling corporate credit card expenses means entering data without making an error. Even a single missing number or double entry can put the employee's reimbursement on hold. Also, routinely submitting expense reports to get back their own money can affect employee happiness.
For finance teams, inaccuracy and inefficiencies in the credit card reconciliation process make the company vulnerable to financial exposure. Also, the traditional reconciliation methods include a high involvement of employees but do little to remove human-prone errors.
Corporate credit cards have helped revolutionize the speed and efficiency of business payments. But this also implies a high volume of transactions. Moreover, the ever-growing number of transactions increases the chances of missing human errors, duplicate submissions, and inaccurate information.
Your accounting team has to sieve through all the transactions and reconcile one-to-one and one-to-many transactions. This can prove to be a costly and cumbersome expense for your company and employees.
According to a survey by Ernst & Young, financial departments spent up to 59% of their resources on managing transaction-intensive processes. Of this, 95% of the effort goes into already matching transactions rather than ones with entry-related problems.
The traditional approach to credit card reconciliation offers no quick and coherent method to find policy violations. Instead, employees must painstakingly go through every transaction to ensure expenses follow the company's travel and expense policies. This further adds to the delay.
Whenever an employee uses the company's credit card for personal expenses or overspends, there is no a way of getting notified unless checked manually. Additionally, a loose policy framework coupled with weak enforcement of T&E policies can misinform employees and cause unauthorized purchases. This also increases the chances of fraud and claims of multiple duplicate expenses.
For employees who use the card for personal expenses, there must be a way to flag violations accurately. For example, when matching the expenses with the bank statements, the finance team has to identify and address personal expenses. While reconciling, finance teams also have to make sure that no errors by vendors or credit card issuers get by.
The manual corporate credit card reconciliation process is time-consuming, costly, and laborious. Additionally, if not done right, it can pose a massive threat to the financial health of your business. The modern approach to ensure a high benchmark of accuracy and efficiency is by implementing an automated expense management software.
Opting for an automated solution over a manual system can help your business overcome these challenges:
Your team (employees and finance teams) end up wasting a lot of time manually inputting, verifying, and approving business expenses. Sadly, regardless of their time and effort, duplicate and fraudulent entries still slip by. You can negate this by using a software that eliminates manual data entry and manual data verification.
An expense management software can extract transaction details from the receipts virtually. Hence, expenses can be submitted, approved, processed, and reimbursed, all without the need for manually entering details. Therefore, the chances of human error and human bias are also drastically reduced.
With an expense management software, all receipts and bank statements are automatically matched and reconciled within a few clicks. This saves the accounting team from manually verifying and approving large quantities of transactions.
Additionally, an expense management software helps in the following ways:
Integration with an automated solution helps ensure that all stakeholders remain compliant at all times. A TEM software ensures the company's expense policies and guidelines are aligned with every expense report claim submitted by an employee.
In the case of a policy violation, an automated expense management software will:
This reduces the time taken to track and resolve any policy violations.
Implementing a robust expense management software can save valuable time and quickly help identify and rectify errors. It ensures the company stays ahead with its audit and tax filing. It also works as an active catalyst in increasing employee compliance.
The credit card reconciliation process has several phases and cycles. Finance teams must follow these processes to the dot to avoid execution errors. In addition, having a clear view of roles and responsibilities helps teams to stay prepared.
Lastly, when all stakeholders know the process, rules, and consequences of not following them, it fosters a work environment of honesty and transparency across the company.
Do your accountants need to wait till the end of the month for credit card reconciliations?
Just imagine how much easier their lives would be if these transactions were recorded and matched in real-time.
Pretty sweet, right? That’s precisely what we do at Fyle.
Fyle launched a real-time expense management solution for customers who’re using SMB and corporate cards in the U.S, starting with Visa. This makes us the first spend management platform to offer direct transaction feeds to any Visa-powered credit card users from any bank.
What does this mean? Any SMB or mid-market company can now access the benefits of an expense management software without changing their cards.
Businesses can now keep track of card spending as it happens while still having granular level control on any Visa card they use.
Don’t you think it’s time to change the way your business manages credit card spend? Why make your accountants wait till the end of the month for reconciliations?
Change how you manage card spend with Fyle’s new real-time feeds. You gain access to direct transaction feeds which helps you get notified of card spend seconds after you swipe your Visa credit card. Additionally, you can also collect receipts in real-time via text, which reduces your dependency on bank feeds.
Schedule a demo today to make your credit card reconciliations easier, faster, and more accurate for all stakeholders!
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Does your finance team have a trusted credit card management system to manage all employee corporate credit card expenses effectively?
Corporate credit card usage is on the rise due to its ease of use. With these cards, employees no longer need to worry about using their own money for business expenses. But with these cards, it becomes all the more critical to effectively track, monitor, and stay on top of things. If ignored, it can rack up extra chores for the entire team. Even worse, it could severely affect your company's bottom-line due to prolonged financial leaks.
But how does one go about picking the right credit card management system for their business?
In this article, we talk about how Fyle as an expense management software can help your finance team tackle challenges related to credit card management and more. Let's dive in!
Credit cards as a payment method have their own set of pros, but keeping track of spending can be difficult. Even a simple task can become demanding, taking up time and effort from your finance team and employees. Traditional methods for managing credit cards, bring with them a set of challenges that could pose a threat to the financial productivity of your business. Here’s why:
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Best Practices to manage Corporate Credit Cards
Fyle has several features that can help you ease your corporate credit management woes. Our automated solution makes sure all the monotonous routines around expense reporting and corporate card management are taken care of. This spares extra time for your finance team to do more intuitive work and put their skills to better use. This also increases productivity and boosts the morale of your team as well.
Fyle as your credit card management system can help you achieve multiple goals in a short period. Here’s a look at some of them:
Irrespective of whether you’re a small business with few cardholders or a large enterprise with multiple cardholders, Fyle allows you to manage all your corporate credit cards with ease. Once your organization’s card feed is set-up, you can easily assign your company’s credit cards to your employees. Additionally, your finance team can also track and monitor all assigned and unassigned cards. This provides for a wholesome approach to effectively managing business credit card expenses.
On assigning cards to users, all the expenses incurred will be directly reflected in your Fyle account. The finance team can then view all the payments made using credit cards. They can also see which of the corresponding expenses are yet to be reported. Additionally, the team can filter and view expenses for desired timelines. Lastly, finance folks can also customize and send timely reminders to employees to match their expenses on time.
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When multiple employees are assigned to various credit card providers, tracking all the transactions in their bank feed can be a demanding task. Fyle takes care of this problem by syncing all your corporate credit card details with direct bank feeds. By integrating directly with the bank providers, you can expect to get a clean feed in real-time. Additionally, we provide a reliable data flow of all your corporate card expenses. This ensures complete protection over your company’s bottom-line.
Sometimes a merchant may unintentionally charge twice for a purchase made through the corporate’s credit card. While it may not be a significant loss, it is necessary to make a note of for accounting purposes - duplicated charges can cause confusion and imbalanced records.
At Fyle, we understand finance teams can easily miss transaction reversals, leading to accounting errors. This is why we created our feature that seamlessly matches every expense to its corresponding transactions.
Pro-tip:
In cases of extra charges, employees need to support their claim with the help of receipts and relevant expense entries.
With a better credit card management system in your hand, you can stay prepared for the tax season as well as for audits. Fyle makes sure that your finance team stays ready without rushing or worrying at the last minute. Our expense management software comes loaded with features that can help your finance team tackle the challenges of accounting. Here are few such instances:
Choosing to handle your corporate credit cards in the old-fashioned way brings numerous challenges tied to it. You may have cards from multiple card providers to suit your needs, but tracking its usage through disparate systems becomes a whole other problem. When you do not own a centralized software to track all cards, identifying assigned cards can be confusing as well. Additionally, when it comes to staying audit-ready, tasks such as reconciliation can become taxing on your finance team.
At Fyle, we understand the challenges that come with managing corporate credit cards for your business. Thus, we have come up with features that will ease the burden on your finance team. This means automating mundane tasks, easy integration, providing direct bank feeds, and matching expenses accurately. With our features available at your disposal, your finance team’s productivity can be optimized and enhanced to help meet business goals.
Want to know more? Schedule a demo with us today to see how Fyle magic works!
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