For day-to-day operations, or business-related travel, a company incurs expenses on their behalf by the employees themselves. Then it’s the task of the HR and finance team to track those expenses and reimburse them in the payroll. 

Most of the businesses still rely on paper receipts and manual monitoring of receipts and reimbursements, but there isn’t a benefit to it except saving technology costs. This is also not completely true, as you incur more loss of time and costs in processing the receipts. Therefore, it is practically smart to choose an expense software which makes the process faster, simpler, and more accurate.

Now comes the question of how to decide the best expense software for your business, as there are various expense software providers in the market catering to different business needs. 

With this article you will be fully equipped with the techniques to choose the best expense management software.

1. Evaluate Your Existing Expense Management Process

Before jumping to any expense management solution you need to first understand where your existing expense management system is lagging behind. Figuring out the pain points in the expense handling system is necessary with following questions like:

• How and where do your employees incur expenses typically?

If the employees use a credit card owned by the company, you need a software solution which tracks expense reports against the same. For expenses incurred personally by the employees, you can place a software which allows the employees to upload easy card receipts on the system. 

• Is there any departmental allocation of funds?

With this system, you can opt for a software solution which can monitor departmental allocations and perform analysis of spending. 

• What pain points do your employees face during the entire expense reporting process?

Analyze their journey from submitting receipts to getting reimbursement – time taken, number of steps to complete, etc.

• How is your present expense management software performing and what new features do you require?

Talk with your employees involved in the process and what changes they feel would simplify the process. 

2. Strategize Specific Goals

Once you analyze the pain points in the present system then you can set specific goals to achieve for a better expense management system. You should ask yourself what problems you want to solve? How will it impact the system in the long run? Will the software solution become a technical problem for the employees?

If you already have expense management software then your goals would change according to its performance. Use this information to set up a list of features you want in your expense management solution and then you can identify reasonable goals that would be achieved with those.

3. Set A Considerable Budget

This is the most crucial factor which makes or breaks the decision of purchasing or upgrading the expense management software. 

Once your goals and objectives are set you need to plan your budget for the same. You need to ask various questions like, Which software falls in your budget range? Does it require any additional costs for updates? 

Also, you must consider the rate of investment (RoI) too in the long run. As of right now a niche-specific solution may suit your needs but an end-to-end software solution might cater to future needs too as the prices would definitely increase later. Then you can select that solution only.  

4. Forecast Organizational Changes

There is also another factor which most businesses ignore while choosing the expense software – Organizational changes.

You should be mindful and take into consideration any future organizational changes which would impact the decision of purchasing or upgrading the expense management software. For example, if you’re onboarding new employees, management, extra funding, more branches, or a collaboration, the expense management process could change. Therefore, choose an expense software which will cater to those changes smoothly.

5. Decide The Features You Require

After this whole research you can easily figure out what features you require in your expense management software. Definitely, you will anyhow require features like, automated approval process, digital receipt capture, real-time reporting and analytics, mobile app integration, etc. You should also look for an intuitive dashboard which allows you to not only track receipts and verify them but also

• Approve or deny easily
• Add or edit expenses
• Identify spending trends
• Set spending limits

But there are other features which depend on your business needs like, for travel companies, GPS tracker system integration helps to verify the traveling expenses of the employee. Such additional features would cost more but would create a transparent working environment and elimination of frauds.

This way your expense management software will become smart and easy to handle every process of the organization seamlessly. 

Conclusion

Managing expenses of the whole organization is not only a cumbersome task but puts a lot of pressure on the organization both physically and mentally. But with expense management software the process not only becomes easier but provides lots of benefits. To choose the best expense management software for your business you need to follow the above checklist to reach the right solution.