Tracking and accounting of business expenses throughout the financial year can be a labor-intensive and loathsome task for both employees and the processing team – HR & accounts – to accomplish. Employee expense solutions like Zento were born and have been evolving as a direct response to this particular pain area for businesses. Zento will not only eliminate outdated methods of expense reimbursement calculation and analysis but also consolidate and evaluate expenditures on both granular and macro levels, to help companies keep up with expense management as they grow in scope and scale.
Here are some of the upcoming trends that will play a pivotal role in the global travel and expense management field in 2019:
1. Obtaining a holistic software for expense control:
Many companies, especially small and mid-sized, still indulge in manual processes or use dated, legacy software for tracking expenses and creating expense reports. Expense reporting is often tedious and daunting for employees and results in frustration. Dated systems also offer negligible scope for expenditure policy reinforcement. To eliminate these time-consuming tasks, an increasing number of companies every year are switching to automated expense control software for digitized expense calculations and payment processes. These systems provide online invoice approvals and expense claim workflows, policy-defined asset purchasing and in-built & customizable expense reports for HR & finance teams and management.
Previously, there was a stigma that solutions like Zento were only practical for large enterprises. But in 2018, we’ve seen an uptick in demand from smaller companies, with as few as 50 employees. The ease of incorporation of Zento into existing business processes gives smaller companies enough comfort to explore adoption.
2. Significance of visibility and transparency in expenditures:
Having financial visibility into a company’s expenses and cash flow plays a crucial role in business expansion. An expense management software compliments your accounting package by aiding in effective decision making, policy formulation, and cost-cutting by allowing executives to have a clear picture of the total expenses incurred by the enterprise. Thus, it increases profitability by analyzing employee spending, clarifying spending patterns and checking policy violations.
3. Eradication of human errors and expense frauds:
Manually copying torn & faded paper receipts, recovering lost tax invoices, misplacing decimal points during input might seem trivial, but its effects can prove detrimental to the company’s health. Enterprises also suffer when employees manipulate expense data, often filing for inflated expense claims and requesting reimbursements. Such occupational frauds can be tackled by switching to automated web-based solutions, which facilitate duplicate detection from submitted invoices as expense reporting takes place on an electronic platform.
Also, the prevalence of fraudulent expense claims can be eliminated if the employees are given corporate expense cards for directing transactions like flight and hotel bookings, food bills and other company purchases. With the help of corporate cards, employees do not need to incur out-of-pocket expenses and claim reimbursement later as every transaction will be carried out via these cards.
One example of abuse is when employees make purchases out-of-pocket, claim back the expense from the company, then reverse purchases and personally claim refunds. We’ve seen a reduction in this over the last few years and expect this trend to further reduce in 2019 with more companies switching over to solutions like Zento.
4. Mobile accessibility:
We’ve finally seen a higher rate of adoption of mobile-enabled expense management solutions like Zento in India in 2018, and this adoption will only increase in 2019 as companies realize the advantages of giving employees the ability to file expense claims easily, as and when they incur expenses, on the go. Such solutions empower employees by letting them submit their requests online and claim reimbursements from any Internet-enabled device, and also improve employee satisfaction and retention due to a much smoother, transparent expense claim process. Thus, invoices are approved and payments are settled in less time, more efficiently, in a cost-effective manner.
In recent years many SMEs are rapidly adopting a travel and expense management software to seek visibility into numbers and control expenses to ensure better profit margins and save processing time. While big enterprises have always been early adopters of business solutions like this, the ease of incorporating an automated expense management solution like Zento is now becoming more apparent to even smaller companies, who earlier might have thought these solutions are too expensive or time intensive to adopt.
With the level of customization on offer, taking into account the user’s needs and preferences and the workflow of every individual organization, 2019 will see accelerated adoption of solutions like ours. To find out if Zento is a good fit for your organization, get in touch with us.
- Business Travel Expense Management Challenges and Solutions - December 19, 2019
- How Expense Reporting Software Helps Growing Small Businesses - September 11, 2019
- How Expense Management Solution Helps Businesses to Manage Expenses Efficiently & Avoid Frauds - July 5, 2019
