In the 21st century, competing in the business sector is challenging unless you know the right ways and techniques to utilize your resources to make proper financial and business decisions.
On the one hand, employee engagement and satisfaction is the most significant way to improve the financial aspects of any company. When employees have directly engaged, the productivity and financial condition of the company automatically increase.
On the other hand, financial performance is a broad terminology that describes any company's overall fiscal health. It is your financial performance by which your company will attract potential investors. With productive employees, you can achieve the required financial goals to help your company scale new heights.
While this might have been easy when employees worked in an office that allowed for easier communication, things changed with the onset of COVID. With distributed and hybrid teams, businesses now have to realign to the new ways of running a business and maintaining employee and financial productivity. But how do companies start with identifying and improving these aspects?
This blog is a quick read on how businesses can improve their financial and employee productivity and find easy ways to adopt tools and software to enable and empower their teams in 2022. So, let's get started!
Your employees are the human capital of your organization. Thus, it is essential to properly utilize these resources to generate the best possible outcomes for your business. Your team of employees is the most valuable resource for your business. Employee performance has a significant impact on a company's ability to achieve objectives and goals. Therefore, productive employees are essential to the finacial growth of a company. The financial aspect for any company is a dynamic and constantly changing environment. It is the job of the managers and employees to make sure that the company stays ahead of the curve. Employee productivity is a major factor in determining the financial performance of any company. This can be measured by looking at different metrics such as employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and retention.
Employee productivity brings operating efficiency, solvency, and profitability. It also ultimately improves the financial performance of your company. Also, due to the rising importance of human capital as a key strategic asset in value generation, firms are integrating their entire strategy with employee performance efficiency. As a result, employee performance is one of the essential factors in improving a company's financial performance, particularly in terms of profitability.
Improving employee performance requires deliberate effort and dedication to understand and assist employees in achieving their maximum potential at work. Almost always, happy and motivated employees translate into productive and assertive individuals who are ready to go the extra mile to get things done.
A good start would be to genuinely understand what's working and what needs improvements in their everyday tasks. These could be both operational and non-operational aspects of their professional lives that could both motivate or hinder them in achieving set goals.
When you have a list of things spread across departments, you can look into possible solutions to help your employees perform better at their jobs. It could be something as simple as a list of automation tools you're business can pick to eliminate errors, miscommunication, and hiccups.
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Investors make financial investments on whether to purchase or sell a company's shares and bonds based on financial data. But, as discussed, the healthy financials of a company heavily depend on the inner functionings of the company.
However, not just investors use financial information to establish a company's credibility rather managers, analysts, stakeholders who study financial data, lenders all of them use it. They could make estimates of potential earnings and growth of company by analyzing the financial performance . Financial success persuades investors to increase their investments and enables horizontal and vertical integration.
Thus, if companies are looking to grow financially sound, it would become imperative to ensure all aspects of the company run like well-oiled machines towards a common goal - business growth and revenue.
The available resources and budgets determine the duration, dependencies, and success rate of a project. Thus, stakeholders must have the right and updated information around resource cost rate, quality cost, reserve analysis, and more.
Benefits of accurate resource and budget projections:
When we multitask without setting priorities, we will probably miss out on essential things while concentrating on something that might really not be as important. Prioritization of tasks and subtasks helps you create a list of things to get done to close a project. In addition, the associated "priority" or "importance score" you determine can guide stakeholders on what to complete first or later.
An easy start could be using productivity apps to handle this for you and your teams. These productivity tools streamline the entire process and help you save on time and resources.
Technology makes it easier for productive work to happen whether remote or otherwise. It ensures that there’s seamless collaboration, and that everything is documented which brings a layer of transparency to all existing processes.
Additionally, these tools also ensure that every discrepancy brought about through manual processes – data entry errors, miscalculations, broken workflows, repeated back and forths, etc., are resolved. It enables admins and other high-level stakeholders to have more control over your organization’s core processes, thereby, enabling them to constantly find ways that can improve performance.
A healthy work environment encourages employee collaboration. Each team member has a unique set of qualities, and their teamwork strengthens them. After all, it is common knowledge that two minds are superior to one.
Collaboration encourages team members to share ideas and work together to accomplish a common goal. A good start for this would be to, depending on the project, conduct daily, weekly, or monthly stand-ups. This ensures every team member has context and focuses only on the objective. Also, try using collaborative tools to help bridge the gap. These tools simplify processes and provide a platform for all stakeholders to collaborate and get things done.
An expense manage software enables your accounting teams to seamlessly collaborate with the rest of the organization by giving them centralized control over your business expense data. Employees can easily submit and track their receipts from applications they use on a daily basis like Teams, Slack, G-Suite, etc.
The real-time policy engines in this software automate compliance. This means that your accountants/finance teams no longer need to verify every submitted report manually, only complaint reports can be submitted which helps save time and money for your finance teams.
Fyle is an expense management software that takes care of all the tedious monitoring and reporting while giving you complete control over organization-wide business expenses. Its OCR and robust data extraction capabilities make expense reporting easy for employees.
Additionally, Fyle comes with a real-time policy engine that seamlessly enforces compliance by automating pre-submission checks. This ensures that only compliant expenses are submitted thereby keeping expense fraud, data entry errors, and out-of-policy expenses at bay in your company.
Now, Fyle has started to offer real-time spend management for Small Business corporate cards with Visa. This makes Fyle the first spend management platform to offer real-time card transaction feeds for Visa. Any SMB or mid-market company can now gain access to a superior software experience without having to change their existing card providers.
Zavvy is an employee enablement platform where you can efficiently onboard, train, and develop your employees be it remote or in-office. Higher officials can now plan a training program for any person with ease and automate it.
This means you wouldn’t have to sit all day and check in with your team to remind them but Zavvy will nudge them in the right direction to continue learning. By running engaging training programs on auto-pilot, you create a cycle of learning and development in your organization that creates upskilled and confident employees in the long run.
Apploye provides a long list of features to manage your in-house or remote employees. The features include time tracking with screenshots, task management, client and invoice, payroll for employees, timesheet, reporting, and GPS tracking for mobile employees.
This software is straightforward to use with an excellent user interface. It also helps employees keep track by allowing screenshot monitoring and real-time tracking. As a result, Apploye is a good software to consider if you want to keep a tab on employee performance and management.
Every business needs a centralized knowledge base for employees and clients to access authorized information quickly. Document360 is a knowledge management platform for creating and publishing self-service knowledge bases and help centers. This software is ideal for businesses looking for an effective knowledge management software.
Document360 solutions also include:
ClickUp is a cloud-based all-in-one project management software that’s built to handle all kinds of projects and improve team collaboration. Teams of all sizes from various industries choose ClickUp as it boosts transparency among team members and offers numerous features.
Some features that enable remote teams to stay connected are instant messaging, collaborative editing for Google Docs, multiple owners for each task, and many more. By letting you add comments to each individual task and assign it to a particular team or member, it ensures all communication blockers are taken care of as you progress through the project.
For most folks, Slack is another word for office communication. And it’s true, Slack is a simple no-nonsense tool that exists to boost team productivity and collaboration.
Slack’s workspaces let you organize company-wide communication through different channels. It lets you connect with your employees flexibly as and when needed while also letting you integrate with other tools and services you use every day which helps you do more work inside Slack.
While employee performance is closely related to your organization’s operating efficiency, financial health is crucial in determining its longevity and profitability. This becomes a necessity as we progress through uncertain economic trends during these post-pandemic and remote work times.
The Fyle-QuickBooks Online Integration is one of the most popular integrations among Fyle users. This self-serve, bi-directional integration ensures quick setup, automated mappings, and an easy way to push expense data into QBO. Finance admins can export employee expenses from Fyle to QBO as a Bill, Expense, Check, or Journal Entry, with the required data coded. Additionally, the integration also enables an admin to import data that can be used while creating expenses, such as Chart of Accounts, Class, Projects, Departments, and Vendors from QBO to Fyle.
Overall, the integration reduces the time and effort spent in manually coding the correct data in QBO and helps Finance teams close books on time.
In June 2020, when Fyle ventured into the US market, there was a strong need for integrations with Accounting systems such as QuickBooks Online; to automatically export expenses to the accounting system with the right information coded.
To support this, Fyle built an integration with QBO in record time (a month). This enabled the business use case of exporting reimbursable and corporate card expenses to QBO and importing Charts of Accounts, Projects, etc., to Fyle.
We onboarded several customers and accounting partners to Fyle, who used the integration to make accounting easier for clients.
The Fyle-QBO integration successfully serves hundreds of Fyle customers and has exported 10,000+ expense reports to QBO. Over the last two years, we have received and solved a number of accounting use cases from our customers. We've added new features, such as:
At the same time, we have also received feedback that the app’s navigation is complicated, and the integration UI requires a certain learning curve in order to complete setup, before it can be used. Some feedback that we have received includes:
Keeping these pain points in mind, we embarked on a journey to redesign the Fyle-QBO integration to offer an intuitive and refreshingly easy experience.
This reimagined version of the Fyle-Quickbooks Online integration will allow customers to easily set up the integration, effortlessly export expenses from Fyle, and resolve any errors in the blink of an eye.
In the previous integration version, ever step in the onboarding redirected the user to a different page (see below), breaking the flow of the process.
In the QBO integration 2.0, the onboarding happens in a guided manner, where the user can configure the steps in a single screen. They're always aware of exactly what step they’re on, and how many steps are pending before the setup is complete.
The new onboarding contains info messages, examples, and previews wherever necessary, in order to assist the user to make decisions at every stage.
Earlier, data pertaining to related configurations was captured in different sections of the integration, which meant users had to navigate to multiple tabs.
For example, while setting up how expenses had to be exported from Fyle, the export type was set up in the ‘Configurations’ section, the bank account to which the expense is to be posted was set up in ‘General Mappings’, and finally, the date and the expense grouping were set up in the ‘Import & Export’ section as shown below:
Now, in the new integration, all related activities are clubbed into one single onboarding step, which can be performed together, instead of being redirected to multiple tabs. For example, while choosing the expense export type, the admin can also set the date that should reflect on the export, the bank account to which this should be posted, and the state from which these expenses have to be pulled in from Fyle.
Generally, in the new design, we’ve ensured all the export-related features are configured in the ‘Export Settings’, all import-related features are enabled in the ‘Import Settings’, and all additional optional configurations that allow admins to customize and automate their business workflow can be completed in ‘Advanced Settings’ as shown below:
Earlier, users had to manually import expense data from Fyle, and then export it to QBO.
In the new integration, users can export data with a single click. The new version will automatically pull in expenses that have reached ‘Payment Processing’ or ‘Paid’ state in real-time, ready to be exported to QBO.
Upon successful export, admins can quickly view the status of the export, and whether all the expenses have been exported to QBO, right in the dashboard.
If the exports have failed due to mapping errors (for ex, missing category), the error reason is visible in the dashboard as shown in the image below:
Admin can quickly resolve the errors by mapping the missing values directly from the dashboard.
A reference list of all failed expenses along with their Fyle link is also provided for the admin in the dashboard.
Compared to this, in the old integration, users had to navigate through multiple screens in order to successfully resolve errors, as shown below
First, users had to come to the ‘Expense Groups’ tab from the ‘Import and Export’ section to view all the failed expenses.
They then had to click on each expense to look at the error due to which the export failed. For example, in this instance, the expense failed to export due to a missing Food category mapping.
Users then had to navigate to the Category mapping section to fix the error, and map the Food category in Fyle to a corresponding category in QBO.
This long process is now shortened with easier error identification and quick fixes from within the dashboard, where the users don’t have to navigate different sections.
Last but not the least, In the new integration, a log of all successful exports is available in a single place. This enables admins to search by unique IDs and filter by different timelines. The export logs give the admin the reference links of these expenses in Fyle and QBO for easier access and further analysis.
With all the new updates, the Fyle-QBO integration 2.0 will help admins export expenses automatically, with the required data in a timely manner, so accounting becomes accurate, and easy.
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!
If you’re a growing business, the move towards getting a corporate credit card becomes a necessity. This small plastic card gives businesses higher power and convenience in managing business expenses and more.
While all of this makes the corporate card seem like a boon, it also has a downside to it. If managing business expenses is a challenge for your business, chances are you also face challenges in your corporate credit card reconciliation process. These processes, if not handled efficiently, can cause financial leaks. This can prove detrimental to the health and growth of your business.
Below, we will discuss:
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How to select a Corporate Credit Card program for your business
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 charges for their expenses. The expense details are then manually matched to the company’s internal finance record to look for any 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. 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.
Pro tip:
Paper expense report forms, Excel sheets, and receipt scanners are the different ways that companies use to store the details of their business expenses.
With the receipts in hand, finance teams can now match credit card statements to reported business expenses. 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. These errors can be corrected if you notify your bank at the earliest. Ensure timely action by reporting any unauthorized activities or fraudulent behavior.
Some examples of commonly occurring errors with card reconciliations are:
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How to manage receipts effortlessly (For the modern employees)
Most companies reconcile credit card expenses with paper-based and spreadsheet-driven methods. This process is not only inefficient but also forces employees to put in long hours of manual labor. This, in the end, only 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 methods of reconciliation include a high-involvement of employees but do little to remove human-prone errors.
In case an employee uses the card for personal expenses, there needs to be a way to flag violations accurately. 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 there are no errors made by the vendors or credit card issuers.
Corporate credit cards have helped revolutionize the speed and efficiency of payments in businesses. But this also implies a high volume of transactions. With the ever-growing number of transactions, the chances of missing human errors, duplicate submissions, and inaccurate information also get higher.
Along with multiple card programs for various employees, departments, and categories, all the data needs to be pulled and managed under one tab. 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 conducted 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 transactions that are already matching rather than with entry-related problems.
The traditional approach to credit card reconciliation offers no quick and coherent method to find policy violations. Employees have to painstakingly go through every transaction to make sure expenses are following 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 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 to multiple duplicate expenses.
The manual corporate credit card reconciliation process is time-consuming, costly, and laborious. Additionally, if not done right, it can pose a huge 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, irrespective of all the time and effort they put in, 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 gives the ability to 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 also drastically reduce.
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 having to verify and approve large quantities of transactions manually.
Additionally, an expense management software helps:
Integration with an automated solution helps ensure that all stakeholders remain compliant at all times. A TEM software makes sure the expense policies and guidelines set by the company are in alignment with every expense report claim submitted by an employee.
In the case of a policy violation, an automated expense management software will:
Implementing a robust expense management software can save valuable time and can quickly help identify and rectify errors. It also ensures the company stays ahead with its audit and tax filing. Lastly, it works as an active catalyst in increasing employee compliance.
The credit card reconciliation process consists of several phases and processes. These processes need to be followed to the dot to avoid any execution errors. Having a clear view of roles and responsibilities helps teams to stay prepared.
Additionally, all stakeholders are well-aware of the process, rules, and consequences of not following them. This ensures transparency across the company.
The corporate credit card reconciliation process is a crucial task for understanding the financial standing of a company. It is also a necessary process to check if your employees are indulging in any fraudulent behavior. Lastly, it helps identify and solve credit card errors and settle disputes with banks and vendors, if necessary.
Manual, paper-based methods can become a complicated procedure involving government policies and your employee’s time and money as well. But this is a tedious and time-consuming process that can be eased by the use of technology.
Do you want to upgrade the way your business reconciles credit card spends? Fyle comes equipped with features like automated reminders, duplicate detection, and card transaction reversals to make the reconciliation process seamless.
Schedule a demo today to make expense management easier, faster, and accurate for all the stakeholders!
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.
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!