Chief financial officers (CFOs) are expected to perform more proactively than an average financial leader and need to always remain cautious on organizational ebbs towards the monetary losses. Today, they are able to fulfill all the requirements properly and with some ease. CFOs receive recognition for secondary functions such as by ensuring regulatory compliance, building good relationships with investors, and more. So, if they overlook these secondary functions, the financial performance might come down too.
Many CFOs claim that they see their role growing and including more non-financial demands, in a survey done by McKinsey, almost 80% of CFOs stated that chief executive officers want them to be more active in building a good strategy for the company.
Role of CFOs in Automating Expense Management
Today, performance management and organizational transformation highly depend on CFOs. They also play a pivotal role in digitizing some crucial business processes at the same time. When all the critical business processes are taken into account, one of the most overlooked processes is managing expenses.
Even though it is considered as an outermost activity, managing expenses have suffered a lot even in the best companies. Numerous solutions have come to the rescue, but they all have fallen short of addressing the pain point properly.
Let us take a look at the traditional expense management processes before switching to an automated expense management solution.
The Three Main Characteristics of Traditional Expense Management are:
- Paper Based Processing
Managing employee expenses effectively is one of the essential objectives of organizations. An inefficient approach can be complex for employees and involves a lot of tedious work of sorting, filing, and attaching expense reports. On the other hand, for managers, it is always a headache. But organizations are used to rely on error-prone excel spreadsheets for tracking employee expenses which are not at all a good idea as there can be major flaws.
- Slow and Costly Process
Relying on paper documents for monitoring and reporting employee expenses makes the entire process slow and extremely costly. Moreover, unnecessary human intervention introduces redundancy.
- Human Error is a Major Concern
Heaps of paper documents are collected by the end of the month and then passed to the management. The managers need to review all the expenses that are mentioned in the document and make out the context of the reported expense, which can be quite difficult to ascertain.
Why Automation Expense Management Process is Necessary
The origin of every problem with expense management is the paperwork. The information needs to be passed to other departments manually resulting in tiresome, slow, and error-prone administrative work. Such kind of ineffectiveness leads to employee dissatisfaction thus ultimately giving rise to problem areas.
By adopting an online expense management software solution, an organization can remove paper-based methods, minimize reimbursement process time, and eliminate fraudulent activities. It saves the time of the finance department, as they no longer have to struggle with expense reporting and paper receipts every month.
Some Advantages of Leveraging an Expense Management System:
- Minimizes Processing Time
An automated travel and expense management solution such as SutiExpense helps to minimize the effort and time related to managing expenses. Employees can capture card feeds automatically and populate them in expense reports that will save employees time. They can also capture receipts and attach them to relevant claims using their smart devices. The entire process of recording expenses minimizes the overall time spent on analyzing and reporting and you can pay attention to other activities.2. Enhances Compliance
There is a chance that more than 10% of claims approved by managers are out of policy. With the help of online expense management software, the policies in place are enforced before any violation can take place, by integrating company spend policies within the reporting process, out of policy or overspending is flagged to enforce these policies. Thus, policies applied within the system will ensure compliance.
- Easy to Track and Analyze Corporate Credit Cards
Expense management systems are specifically designed to complement business credit cards, enabling managers to see the activity in real time and manage risks in a better way. With this approach, it will be possible to reconcile expenses and create permanent, internal revenue service compliant records with just the click of a button.
- 4. Quick Reimbursement Cycle
Late reimbursement after submitting expense reports can be annoying for all the employees. An effective expense reporting software can minimize turnaround time by enhancing accessibility for quick submission, approval, and reimbursement process. Employees can submit their reports on the move and managers can review and approve them within minutes.
- Provides Advanced Security
A good expense management system ensures that all important data is secured and reduces the risk of malicious external attacks. Data is stored in the cloud and protected with proper security. Administrators can also authorize access to only HR staff, senior management or necessary approvers to limit access to information.
To Sum Up
It is very crucial for the CFO of a company to implement automated expense management software to save businesses money and time and to eliminate the hard work associated with paper receipts. It enables the accounting department to review, audit, approve and pay expenses smoothly thereby controlling overspending.
