Handling expenses is a necessary evil for any business. The old-school way of tracking receipts, logging costs, enforcing policies, and creating reports can be a serious time suck and leave too much room for error. Thankfully, modern software can automate the entire expense management process to make things way easier.

In this post, we’ll look at the headaches of manual expense tracking and how automation eliminates the pain. I’ll outline must-have features to look for in expense software and how it can integrate with your accounting system for seamless financials. You’ll learn key factors in choosing a solution and tips for getting employees on board.

With the right tech and change management, you can slash the time and costs of managing expenses while gaining total visibility and control. Let’s dive in!

The Struggle is Real: Challenges of Manual Expense Tracking

Most businesses today rely on manual processes for handling employee expenses. We’re talking paper receipts, Excel spreadsheets, and email reports. As you can imagine, this approach comes with some major drawbacks:

Doing Data Entry by Hand Sucks

Without automation, employees have to manually collect receipts, create reports, log expenses, and submit everything to the finance team. Then the accountants re-enter that same data. This double (or triple) handling eats up heaps of time that could be spent on value-adding work.

More Room for Errors

With employees typing in expenses, there’s plenty of room for accidental mistakes, lost receipts, duplicate data entry, and non-compliant spending. This leads to incorrect financials and potential missed tax deductions. Ouch!

Delayed Insights and Reporting

Making sense of expenses and creating reports is difficult and slow with manual processes. This means delayed visibility into spending trends, budget overages, and other key indicators. Not ideal.

These challenges add up to frustrated employees, inaccurate financials, and a lack of spending control and insights. Automated software aims to eliminate the headaches.

The Promise Land: Benefits of Automated Expense Tracking

Purpose-built expense management systems replace manual work with automated tools for capturing, categorizing, approving, and reporting on costs. Some major upsides are:

Streamlined Data Capture

Employees can quickly snap pics of receipts with their phone and upload them. Details like the date, merchant, amount, and the receipt image itself are automatically captured. No more tedious data entry!

Real-Time Visibility

Expenses instantly sync to give finance up-to-the-minute tracking abilities. Dashboards neatly display spending by category, employee, project, and more. Now that’s insightful!

Automated Reporting

The software automatically generates expense reports in whatever format you need, be it PDFs or exports for your accounting platform. Sayonara spreadsheets!

Other killer features include flagging non-compliant spending, automatic mileage and per diem calculations, and multi-currency support.

Together this eliminates manual work for employees and finance teams while delivering real-time spend visibility and control. It’s a win-win!

Must-Have Features for Expense Tracking Software

The right software will include a robust set of features to fully automate expense management, including:

Mobile Receipt Capture

Employees can snap photos of receipts to extract key details like merchant name, date, amount, and VAT automatically for one-touch receipt tracking.

Intelligent Data Extraction

Advanced OCR capability parses receipt data and captures key fields without manual typing. This may include item-level purchase extraction too.

Customizable Categories and Fields

Businesses can define hierarchical expense categories and customize data fields to match unique reporting needs. Enforce required fields for receipts to aid reporting.

Automated Policy Compliance

Configure spend policies like daily limits or required approvals. The software automatically checks expenses and flags violations for policy compliance.

Flexible Reporting and Exports 

Generate reports by employee, category, department, project, and more. Export in multiple file formats or auto-send recurring reports to key stakeholders.

Robust reporting and custom fields enable data exports to feed directly into an accounting system or ERP platform. This avoids duplicate data entry.

Prioritize solutions that offer intuitive mobile apps, intelligent OCR scan, custom fields, and rules-based automation for streamlined expense capture.

Integration with Accounting Systems 

To maximize the benefits of expense automation, the software should integrate directly with your accounting platform or ERP system. This facilitates:

Syncing Expenses for Up-To-Date Financials

Real-time sync of approved expenses into the accounting system avoids duplicate manual entry. This enhances accuracy and timeliness of financials.

Eliminating Duplicate Data Entry

Rather than re-entering expenses across both systems, direct integration passes approved costs to the accounting platform in the background.

Ideally the software lets you map custom expense fields to corresponding columns in the accounting system. This facilitates seamless data flow into financial reports.

Key Factors to Consider When Choosing Software

With many expense management solutions on the market, focus on these key considerations during your evaluation process:

Ease of Use and Training Requirements

The system should be intuitive for employees to learn with minimal training needed. If the tool is too complex, adoption will struggle.

Data Security Protections

Robust data encryption, access controls, and security certifications are essential for safeguarding sensitive corporate card details and expense receipts.

Scalability and Customization

Evaluate if the solution can scale with your growth and be customized to meet current and future process needs.

Implementation and Ongoing Support

Look for providers that offer hands-on implementation assistance and multi-channel customer support. 

Total Cost of Ownership

Consider both monthly subscription costs plus internal costs of management and maintenance over the lifetime of use.

Getting Employee Buy-In for Adoption

Driving consistent employee adoption is key to realizing the full benefits of automated expense management. Strategies to gain buy-in include:

Communicating Benefits and Addressing Concerns

Explain how the system saves employees time while increasing spending oversight. Address any adoption objections head on.

Providing Proper Training and Resources

Create onboarding guides, videos, and tip sheets on how to use the software. Offer live training sessions.

Setting Expectations and Company Expense Policies

Set clear guidelines for expense submission expectations and policies. Hold employees accountable.

Gaining employee buy-in accelerates adoption across the business and ensures the software tackles core pain points.

Conclusion

Manual expense tracking processes generate frustration, errors, delayed insights, andDuplicate data entry. Automated software aims to eliminate these pain points through streamlined expense capture, intelligent OCR receipt parsing, automated reporting, accounting system integrations, and robust data analytics.

As you evaluate options, focus on ease of use, data security, customization, implementation support, total cost of ownership, and driving employee adoption. Implementing the right expense automation solution saves considerable time and money while providing real-time spend visibility and policy control. Carefully selecting and rolling out automated software lays the groundwork for unlocking these significant benefits.