Small business owners are always looking for ways to improve their bottom line. Almost every aspect of running a small business can have an effect. One aspect that can have a significant impact on your revenue is the expense side of the equation. Managing your expenses is much easier when you have the right set of tools at your disposal. Expense management tools are becoming much more affordable these days, and they aren’t just restricted to large businesses anymore.
What 5 key Expense Report Software features should I look for?
Accounting integration
Many systems integrate with popular accounting systems such as Xero, Microsoft Dynamics, and Sage 50 (formerly known as Peachtree), allowing for easy export of reports and eliminating the need for manual data entry.
Expense compliance
Helps enforce corporate spending policies and assist with fraud detection flagging expense overages, duplicate expenses, missing documentation (e.g., receipts), and so forth.
Approval workflow
Streamlines the review and approval process by enabling managers to configure workflows according to expense type and other variables.
Analytics reporting
Customizable reports help forecast and budget for future expenses, identify spending trends and highlight cost savings opportunities.
Automatic expense import
Connects to personal and corporate accounts and credit cards, allowing users to pick and choose charges to add to expense reports.
Tradogram
Tradogram is a cloud-hosted e-procurement platform designed to automate and streamline purchasing through powerful yet easy-to-use tools. It is intended to give full control to buyers and decision-makers when it comes to their procurement processes. The software can ably assist you in managing suppliers, controlling costs, and maximizing expenses – areas that can negatively impact a company’s bottom line if not handled efficiently. With Tradogram, you can easily connect with your suppliers, confident that you’ll get all the materials, goods, or services you need at reduced cost without sacrificing quality.
Tradogram bills itself as the future of spend management, offering strategic solutions as well as best practices to purchasing so you can get optimum value and lowest price from the products and services you ordered. In addition, you get features and capabilities to automate purchasing process, sourcing events, and simplify supply chain management. These provide you with critical spend visibility and help you spur company growth.
Since procurement is a universal business function, Tradogram’s applicability cuts across businesses of all types and sizes. It can be utilized in manufacturing and production, retail, construction, healthcare, and other service industries. It can even be customized to your organization’s particular requisitions requirement and flexible enough to let you procure materials straight from your items database or via external sources like catalogs and websites. To help you attain and keep total control, Tradogram allows you to set budgets and approvals for your branches and departments.
Features
- Purchase-to-Pay
- Sales & Purchase Order Management
- Order Requisitions
- Instant Messaging
- Approval Routing
- Budget Tracking
- Project Management
- Contract Management
- RFQ/RFP
- Order Management
- Delivery Tracking
- Process Automation
- Strategic Sourcing
- Invoice Reconciliation
- Inventory Control
- Spend Analysis
- Custom Reporting
- Customization Options
Paramount WorkPlace
Paramount WorkPlace is a requisition, procurement, and expense solution that enables organizations to reduce processing costs, make informed purchasing decisions, and ensure their procurement and requisition process’s overall efficiency.
Paramount WorkPlace fits the needs of small, medium-sized, and large enterprises looking to implement and boost web and mobile procurement and requisition workflows. It can support the needs of as few as five users or as many as over 3,000 users. WorkPlace can be deployed for varied industries, from state and local government agencies to hospitality and pharmaceutical companies, and more.
With Paramount WorkPlace, your team is empowered to make purchases through a convenient purchase catalog while ensuring that their purchase is within the company’s budget. With a pre-defined and ad-hoc approval process, you can enforce entry rules, impose approval rules, detect variances, and impose other policies to ensure that you manage and control your company’s expenditures. Meanwhile, you can eliminate manual processes through automated invoice capture and smart optical character recognition processing, helping you to transform your process into a paperless workflow while saving time and effort.
Workplace has robust requisition and procurement features with comprehensive coverage of the process, from requests for quotes, catalog purchases, purchase approval, payment processing, tax assessment and recovery, and transaction monitoring. On the other hand, its travel and expense management solution allows you to capture and report travel-related expenses, track and account for cash advances, and easily audit transactions. It also has a project timesheet capability for employees and contractors to be billed accurately for their time.
WorkPlace can be integrated with several business solutions like SAP, Netsuite, Blackbaud, and more. This allows users to streamline their processes and make data import/export simpler.
Lastly, WorkPlace has a mobile app that allows you to process requisitions, create and approve expense entries, as well as make timesheets wherever you are.
Features
- Guided buying catalogs
- Punchout capabilities
- Requisition status monitoring
- Requisition ad hoc approvals
- Budgeting engine
- Dynamic rule and engine approval workflow
- Centralized invoice matching
- Vendor contract management
- Vendor approval
- Mobile catalog shopping and approvals
- Detailed audit reporting
- Secure RFQ portal
- RFQ management
- Enterprise purchase order management
- Flexible general ledger distributions
- Multiple receiving capabilities
- Drag-and-drop invoice attachments
- Customizable questionnaires
- Tax engine
- Check request approvals
- Multi-currency
- Multi-language
Sage HR
Sage HR, previously called Cake HR, is a cloud-based human resource management solution designed to help businesses in various industries manage employees. It provides HR-related assistance in areas like recruitment, performance report, shift scheduling, expenses, and more.
Aside from its main human resource features, Sage HR offers six modules; Recruitment Management, Performance Management, Timesheets Management, Shift Scheduling Management, Leave Management, and Expenses Management. Businesses can customize which modules to get and will be billed either monthly or annually. Needless to say, Payroll Management is not yet part of Sage HR’s modules but it does have integration with Sage 50cloud Payroll Software.
Through Sage HR, hiring specialists can already manage the recruitment process easily and digitally. Managers will have the ability to provide accurate performance reports to their subordinates. And employees who have access to Sage HR can now check and create shift schedules and leave schedules online without having to prepare a lot of paper works.
You can also access Sage HR anywhere you are internet-connected, from any device such as desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. It can also be integrated with Slack, which is an innovative communication and sharing software. Sage HR has a 14-day free trial that allows users to experience all six modules. Also, users can cancel their subscriptions anytime they want.
Zoho Expense
Zoho Expense is an online solution that enables organizations to effectively manage business travel and spend.
Zoho Expense automates expense reporting – from receipt to the balance sheet, and helps organizations save a significant amount of time and effort.
Zoho Expense also streamlines business travel and booking, enforces multi-level approvals, and tracks advance payments.
Hidden costs and time associated with manual expense reporting significantly reduce courtesy of Zoho Expense’s ability to automate approval and other processes. Budgets, powerful spend rules and limits, and analytics help tighten reins on spending. A high degree of customization ensures organizations can implement Zoho Expense quickly, effectively, and without changing existing processes.
Integration with a wide range of apps helps Zoho Expense fit into existing ecosystems seamlessly.
Key benefits of using Zoho Expense:
*Intuitive UI
* Automated expense creation from receipts, card transactions, and more
* Automated expense reporting and approval
* Multi-level approvals
* Automatically enforced spend rules and limits
* Fine-grained customizations
* Airtight budgeting and compliance
* Expedited reimbursements
* In-app collaboration
* Powerful accounting, ERP, travel, and other integrations
Xero
Xero is a cloud-based small business accounting software with tools for managing invoicing, bank reconciliation, inventory, purchasing, expenses, bookkeeping, and more. Xero is an alternative to QuickBooks. It is a modern, small business accounting software that lives in the cloud. It’s accessible from any computer or mobile device, making for a smarter and easier accounting process, with features including cash flow tracking, payment processing, bank reconciliation, expense tracking, inventory management, financial reporting, and more.
The Xero dashboard presents users with a clear and concise overview of their financial situation. It provides small business owners with a greater understanding of their cash flow by highlighting bank balances, outstanding invoices, upcoming bills, and expense claims in a visually appealing way. Daily bank and credit card transactions are automatically imported into Xero and matched to their corresponding accounting transaction. Doing bank reconciliation is as easy as confirming the match is corrected and clicking “OK.”
Xero integrates with over 1,000 third-party apps commonly used by small businesses including Stripe, PayPal, Capsule, HubSpot, and more in order to streamline workflows and synchronize data such as sales invoices, client data, cashflow reports, payroll data, and more. Data flows directly into the Xero ledger, removing the time and effort required for manual data entry. Every Xero plan comes with unlimited users, so there’s no need to pay for extra licenses. Collaborate with colleagues or invite financial advisors to view data remotely and get valuable real-time advice.
Key benefits of using Xero:
- Keep accounting data safe and secure.
- Access accounts online anytime from anywhere, even on the go using mobile devices (iPhone/iPad/Android) or tablet.
- Get better visibility on cashflow with real-time data.
- Reduce the time spent keeping accounts up to date.
- Software updates are free and available when users log in.
- Collaborate with the whole team and an accountant. Users decide what each person can see.
Emburse Certify Expense
Emburse brings together some of the world’s most powerful and trusted financial automation solutions. As part of our product portfolio, Emburse Certify carries a promise to humanize work while delivering expense, accounts payable, and business travel solutions for growing organizations.
Emburse Certify Expense effortlessly streamlines your operations through automation and superior customer service. Automatically create reports for employees, streamline approvals, and make reimbursement and reporting effortless for accountants. Certify is rated as a Leader in expense management by analyst firm, IDC, and is trusted by more than 4,000 organizations including Boot Barn, H&R Block, and Virgin Galactic, to streamline expense processing, purchasing, and travel booking.
Key benefits of using Emburse Certify Expense:
- Eliminate tedious and error-prone manual data entry
- Save time and help employees focus on the work that drives your business forward
- Streamline reconciliation and reduce reimbursement times
- Automatically enforce compliance with built-in policy controls
- Gain company-wide visibility into spend
- Built for global commerce with support for 140+ currencies and 64 languages
Conclusion
Small business owners have a lot of expenses. Expense management software makes it easy to control your expenses. You may be surprised at how much you actually save by using the right software.