Your month-end close is a race against time. You're juggling financial reporting, ensuring compliance, and providing strategic insights. The last thing you need is to be bogged down by a mountain of expense reports, chasing employees for missing receipts, and manually reconciling endless credit card statements. Yet, for many finance teams, this chaotic and intense process is a monthly reality.
Suppose your team dreads the day the credit card statements arrive. In that case, you know that manual expense management is more than just an inconvenience—it's a significant drain on productivity that keeps you from the work that matters most.
How a Manual Expense Process Holds Your Finance Team Back
A manual expense management system, often patched together with spreadsheets and email, creates bottlenecks that ripple across the organization. This inefficiency is a primary trigger for companies to seek a better solution.
Time-Consuming Reconciliations
This is a pain point mentioned in virtually every conversation about expense management. Teams spend hours, if not days, manually downloading statements, matching receipts to transactions in Excel, and keying data into their accounting software.
The process is so inefficient that it can take an average of 400 hours to process just 1,000 expense reports. This lost time could be spent on higher-value strategic analysis.
The Never-Ending Chase for Receipts
Your finance team wasn't hired to be detectives, yet they spend a significant amount of time extracting receipts from employees. Employees, especially those in the field, often struggle to manage paper receipts, which are easily lost or damaged. This constant back-and-forth is frustrating for everyone and results in incomplete records and compliance risks.
Lack of Real-Time Visibility and Control
When you rely on monthly statements, you’re flying blind for weeks at a time. This makes it nearly impossible to proactively manage budgets. By the time you spot an out-of-policy purchase, the money has already been spent. This lack of control can lead to overspending and render accurate financial forecasting a mere guess.
Hurdles in Manual Expense Management Across Industries
While the pain is universal, different industries face unique challenges:
Construction
In construction, finance teams are tasked with coding a high volume of expenses to specific jobs and cost codes. Manually entering this data from hundreds of job-site receipts is a monumental task that drains productivity. This prevents the finance team from providing project managers with the timely, accurate cost data they need to keep projects profitable and on schedule.
Non-Profits
For non-profits, the finance team's time is critical for ensuring compliance and reporting to donors. Time spent manually reconciling expenses and tracking down receipts from field staff is time not spent on managing grants, preparing for audits, and maintaining the financial transparency that is crucial for donor trust.
SMBs
For small and medium-sized businesses, limited financial resources often mean lean finance teams. What might have been manageable with a handful of employees and transactions quickly becomes overwhelming as the business grows.
SMBs often find themselves spending disproportionate amounts of time on manual expense reporting, diverting precious hours from core business activities. This reliance on spreadsheets and manual processes for a growing number of receipts and cards can quickly lead to errors and a significant drain on productivity, especially as they look to streamline operations and improve efficiency.
Mid-Market Companies
As companies scale into the mid-market, their transaction volume grows exponentially. While these companies typically handle higher transaction volumes, their finance teams are often still lean, struggling with manual processes that were once manageable at a smaller scale.
This rapid increase in expense volume can lead to burnout and prevent the team from focusing on the strategic financial oversight that a growing company requires.
Without automated solutions, mid-market companies face significant challenges in maintaining accurate data and controlling spending across larger teams and more complex financial structures. The lack of real-time visibility and efficient approval workflows often becomes a critical roadblock to achieving faster financial closes and optimizing decision-making
How Fyle Automates Your Workflow and Boosts Productivity
Fyle is designed to eliminate these productivity drains by automating the most time-consuming tasks for both your employees and your finance team.
Automate Reconciliations with Real-Time Feeds
Fyle provides real-time transaction feeds by partnering directly with major credit card networks, including Visa and Mastercard. This means you no longer have to wait for statements or deal with broken bank feeds.
When an employee swipes their card, the transaction appears in Fyle almost instantly. This allows you to reconcile expenses in minutes, not days, freeing up your team for more critical tasks.
Make Receipt Submission Effortless for Employees
We make submitting receipts a one-click experience. When an employee uses their corporate Visa or Mastercard, they receive an instant SMS notification. They can simply reply with a photo of the receipt, and Fyle’s AI-powered engine automatically matches it to the correct transaction.
Employees can also submit e-receipts directly from their Gmail or Outlook inboxes without changing their workflow. This ease of use is why customers see receipt submission times drop from over 30 days to as little as one day.
Gain Instant Control with Real-Time Spend Visibility
Fyle’s CoPilot gives you an up-to-the-minute view of company-wide spending. You can see incomplete expenses, track spending by project or department, and identify out-of-policy spending as it happens. Our policy engine can flag violations before they’re even submitted, ensuring continuous compliance and eliminating the need for manual checks.
Give Your Team the Time to Focus on Growth
Manual expense management isn't only inefficient, but it also acts as a barrier to strategic growth and development. It keeps your most valuable finance professionals buried in spreadsheets and paperwork, preventing them from performing the analysis that drives smart business decisions.
By automating the entire process—from receipt capture to final reconciliation—Fyle returns valuable time to your team. We handle the tedious work so you can focus on what you do best: guiding the financial health of your company.
Ready to ditch the spreadsheets for good?
Schedule a demo to see how Fyle can transform your expense management process.
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