One of the most important aspects of both spend and expense management is how efficiently you conduct the process. A significant component of this is how well you manage your expense approvals.
If you’re looking to boost the efficiency of your expense approvals, then you should consider automating the process, which will bring your company a whole host of benefits.
Here are five of the main reasons why you should automate your expense approval process.
1. Full visibility on corporate spend
Automating your expense approval process is important for giving you complete visibility on your corporate spend.
In order to execute your spend and expense management correctly, you need to have the most accurate picture of how your company is spending money.
With more traditional forms of approval processes, it can sometimes take several days for payments to be approved. This means your record of transactions and pending payments will be also lagging behind, giving a less complete view of corporate spend.
However, with automated approval processes, payments will be approved and completed much quicker, giving more visibility surrounding your corporate spend.
2. More control over aspects of spending
Another reason why you should automate your expense approval process, is because it gives you more control over how your company is managing spend.
With automated approval, you can set specific criteria that has to be met in order for a payment to be automatically approved.
For instance, this could be for any transactions which are below a certain amount, or payments to specific companies or services. Also, you can allocate certain teams or areas of the business into the criteria.
This enables you to control your company spend more efficiently, making sure only payments you deem appropriate are automatically approved for your company.
3. Improve efficiency with workflows
Automated approval processes are also beneficial in the way they increase the efficiency of your payment workflows.
With standard approval processes, there’s always the possibility of delays or slow approval times, which can drastically hinder the flow of payments, spend or expense management, and your business as a whole.
However, when automating these approvals, transactions are requested and approved without any need for manual intervention, which massively speeds up these payment workflows.
This means a significant increase in the efficiency of your business, where you can execute payments for clients, services, etc., with instant results.
4. A variety of accurate and real-time data
When handling your expenses, it’s vital to have the most accurate data being provided for your company, which why you need automated approval processes.
When you have an advanced spend management software, it can give you a range of real-time data surrounding all of your payments, including what was spent, who the payment was made to, the time of payment, etc.
If your approval process is delayed, this will also delay all the important data you need to gather for your expenses. With more instant approvals, each payment can be completed quicker and added to the record of expenses in your company for review.
5. Faster reimbursement for employees
Another benefit of automating your expense approval process is that your employees can receive their expense reimbursements much faster.
In many instances, employees might be required to pay for something out of pocket on behalf of the business. For example, this could be buying lunch for a client, or initially paying for accommodation whilst on business travel.
With a standard approval process, this could potentially leave an employee without adequate reimbursement for several days, and this is challenging when the expenses are higher.
With automatic expense approval, the employee can have their reimbursement much quicker, not only ensuring their able to handle their payments, but also boosting employee satisfaction in the company.
These top five reasons are among many more, when it comes to automating your expense approval process. So, make sure you implement the right software to help you experience these benefits for yourself.
You can always research further information on how to automate your expense approval process, to give you a clearer idea of what software will suit your company best.
