For a business to thrive, expense management systems are significant irrespective of the nature of the business. Even a small-scale business needs its expenses to be tracked in-order to sustain. This is because every business transaction both in terms of the amount spent and frequency needs to be monitored in order to cut down unnecessary expenses which in turn helps in increasing profits and is integral to the sleek functioning of an enterprise.
Expense management refers to the systems deployed by a business to process, pay, and audit employee-initiated expenses. These costs include, but are not limited to, expenses incurred for travel and entertainment. Expense management includes the policies and procedures that govern such spending, as well as the technologies and services utilized to process and analyse the data associated with it. Businesses need to thoroughly check expenses to ensure the business complies with regulations and make sure employees aren’t spending beyond stipulated limits. An automated system can make the process more time-efficient and accurate, easier to track, and give greater control over compliance with policy. Expense management technology tools can help with business audits by providing visibility into better expense and cash flow monitoring.

Six Key Benefits of Automated Expense Management Systems

Top 5 Expense Management Software

Brex Empower is a powerful expense management software that lets you delegate spending while maintaining accountability. Each expense will be assigned to a budget so that expenses within policy are proactively approved for teams, vendors, stipends, and more. Simpler and smart payment methods help the users to target on with the expense and critically analyse the places where attention is required. It also helps in automatically identifying the weird expenses made within the business.

Features:

Ramp is a flexible real time expense tracking application where everyone within the system gets access to the expense real time together with alerts which caution users to limit the expense and check out to avoid / prevent the expense. Ramp provides a platform designed to save time and money. With Ramp you get software that consolidates corporate cards, expense management, bill payments, accounting, and reporting into one simple and free solution designed to avoid wasting time and money.

Features:

Expensify provides speed and ease to deliver an answer that helps companies manage expenses faster and easier. Creating reports is incredibly easy with Expensify, as you merely have to snap a fast photo of the receipt with its mobile-friendly app. Its Smart Scan feature perfectly captures all the mandatory information to make error-free expense reports quickly.
The tool is additionally capable of importing expenses directly for banks and credit cards to make reports instantly. The software assists with expense management with the assistance of several advanced features. It empowers managers with effective approval process control to facilitate speedy approvals and better control of a company’s spending.
Expensify also provides features like receipt and invoice management, time tracking, workflow management, and reimbursement management among other more so as to effectively manage one’s expenses.

Features:

Powered by an intuitive dashboard, Zoho Expense provides an experience unique when it comes to expense management. Zoho delivers solutions that simplify various aspects of a business’s operations. Businesses get comprehensive insights into various aspects of all submitted and pending reports, the reimbursement amount, and details pertaining to expenses that go undetected. The analytics section of this tool is a sound feature. It gives you an in-depth outlook of the company’s spending across its various departments.
Moreover, you will be able to automatically set policy guidelines that expedite the approval process and simply integrate the tool with a spread of other useful management software. These integrations include Zoho CRM, Zoho Books and Zoho People.

Features:

Concur Expense helps the business automate expense management, capture spending from multiple sources, plan and make spending decisions based on accurate data, and reimburse employees quickly. Concur Expense presents all of the expense data in one place and it configures settings to your business needs as well as businesses can easily enforce and alter spending policies. The receipts and process reports are captured automatically to extend the efficiency of the staff.

Features:

Comparative Study of Expense Management Tools

The below table helps us to get a quick understanding of the top 5 widely used expense management tools.

With an effective expense management system in place, keeping track of cash flows of your business and providing critical insights that can help businesses grow and succeed. The above-discussed expense management products are widely used and investing in such automated tools helps businesses with improving expenditure controls, easing reporting processes, and playing a major role in cost reduction. Such a system is an essential part of any business and should not be overlooked if you want to stay ahead of the competition. Choosing the right softwares drives automation and optimization of expense management workflow.