Businesses all around the world face this common issue of handling expense management flaws through heavy processing costs and hours of a day. Still the process remains nerve-wrecking and frustrating. Traditionally, expense tracking is a manual process which involves HR and finance departments to collect the receipts and documents, verify them manually as per company’s policies, and then forward them to approval manager, and wait for months to get reimbursement.

Such a long-waiting process of expense tracking inhibits company’s growth, and incurs huge processing costs with frustration. To tackle the issues with traditional expense tracking, digitization has provided a one-fit-all solution. The expense management software shifts the manual, tiring expense tracking activity to a virtual, effortless expense tracking process.

It manages the end-to-end expense management cycle – collecting receipts, verifying claims, approval scheduling, and reimbursement notifications, in a seamless and transparent manner. But, selecting the software which suits your business needs is the key to this investment. Dext expense software allows you to explore the features suitable to your business requirements.

There are many features which help expense software in modernizing expense tracking in an organization.

1. Mobile Integration

Investing in software technology means having the comfort to not only upload expense receipts and get them verified automatically, but also to approve those expenses by managers and the HR department.

Your expense software should have a mobile app integration, which would allow you and all the stakeholders (owners, employees, and investors) to access the data anywhere, at any time.  Also, the expense software app gets self-updated, which keeps the application and data updated, even the changing tax compliances get installed with the updates. You can also limit the access to view or edit the data as the owner, allowing transparency according to the role of employees.

2. Smart Recognition

With digitization, you expect the expense software to do more than just capturing and recording expense receipts.

The in-built powerful algorithms of machine learning and artificial intelligence automatically extracts all the relevant data from the receipts and allows you to verify them before sending them to your manager. This helps in an easy and effortless gateway for employees to interact with the expense tracking cycle, and get notified for every step of the process without any delay.

You can also look for advanced features in some expense softwares like QR code scanning, which records the metadata of the receipts in just a code, making it a secure way to store the data in the system.

3. Automatic Currency Conversion

Major expenses for a company includes travel and trips for business, company vacations, etc., which need to be tracked precisely as the costs involved are huge. But the amount can be in any currency format too, or the expenses incurred may be in different currencies.

For this, the expense software allows you to upload the original expense receipts to the system, and the smart system automatically converts the amount number into the company’s standard currency format with the exchange rate as on the date of the expense incurred. This saves the exchange rate anomaly while reimbursement, and also provides smooth reporting of the expenses.

4. Automated Workflow

Establishing a user-friendly, multi-level, dynamic workflow makes the expense reporting process less time-consuming and sustainable for all the stakeholders involved.

You don’t need to monitor or check different levels of organization to workout the expense reporting process. Here, a rule-based workflow system is automated by the expense software, which cuts down the processing time and costs without any human intervention.

5. Cloud-based Service

The expense software comes in two versions – on-premise (local) or SaaS (cloud-based). So, each solution offers different solutions with different pricing. With on-premise expense software, your investment costs are high, and you get all the features at once. While, a SaaS (cloud-based) solution has monthly-paid subscription service which can be canceled anytime. Also, the cloud-based software gets automatically updated, and provides anywhere access with an internet connection.

Cloud technology has modernized the expense reporting process in a seamless manner.

6. Intuitive Dashboard

The user-experience of working on expense software should be smooth and easy to use. You can also adjust to the required user-interface for your company, which shows all the relevant information on one smart dashboard without searching for it.

For example, the dashboard shows expenses waiting approval, approved ones, categories of expenses, policy violations, etc. features which enhances the user experience for easy understanding at all the levels of organization.

7. Easy Exportability

A lot of times you have to send some expense reports, or receipts uploaded data to the finance team for verification, it may be that their device doesn’t support the files you sent them. For example, you uploaded an expense receipt but somehow it couldn’t get uploaded due to some technical issues, you can’t send an unsupported file for verification as it complicates the process even more, and may even seem illegitimate.

But, you don’t need to worry about this with expense software, as it provides all-file formats support which makes it easy to export any data to any stakeholder of the company.

8. Security Of Data

Expense records maintenance is a serious task which requires transparency along with security of data. With manual expense tracking it gets messy to handle and store physical receipts, and preserve them intact without any frauds and loss of receipts.

But, the expense software not only automates the recording and storing of expense receipts, but also keeps them secured and safe with various layers of protection – passwords at different levels, login access to selective employees, restricted access of view only to employees, etc. This practice keeps check on every level of organization irrespective of the seniority of employees, and ensures only valid expense receipts to pass through the reimbursement system.

Conclusion

Expense reporting requires a smart approach today to compete with other businesses, which is expense software. It makes your expense reporting process simple with automated receipts verification and recording, mobile-app integration, easy exportability, accounting software integration, smart recognition, etc. Also, your data remains safe and secured with multi-layer protection. So, your expense tracking becomes modernized truly with expense software.