Good-quality, robust spend management software helps team members make the right kinds of decisions, providing visibility and control into the areas where they can make adjustments. A really robust system will translate these capabilities across your entire spend: if your team can aggregate accounts payable, expenses, card spending and employee reimbursements into one tool, that’s a very powerful place for technologists to be.
The best solution will also enable quick document capture, help teams to reduce repetitive tasks, and give real-time expense tracking, including handling of different currencies.
1. Vendor Relationship Management
Furthermore, through vendor relationship management tools, a company could keep track of expenses and payment dates so it could avoid financial risks by knowing well in advance if it might face issues paying them. It would also make compliance easier and speed up reimbursement processes. It could also help a company form a sound and proactive negotiation strategy with vendors by providing appropriate information.
A small business spend management tool can demystify and streamline all this expense. Such a tool replaces the padded cash box and automates expense reporting, reducing slip-ups and staff time; it grants a single view of spend across divisions.
Pleo is a fairly slick expense management tool that will work well for small organisations: you can issue corporate cards to individuals or teams (these can be virtual-only, physical-only or combinations of both – you can also set transaction-based limits), and you can use the tool to search email in order to find receipts automatically. It includes integrations with FreshBooks, Xero or Sage Intacct accounting systems.
Coupa is a fully automated spend management solution, which provides a single-source procure-to-pay management tool that consolidates the functions of purchasing, AP automation and corporate cards within a single, unified dashboard. It can automate the following procurement workflow:1) routing a PO to the correct approver;2) permitting an employee to spend;3) reminding users to approve POs that have become ‘stale’;4) alerting users to potential suppliers violating a contract;5) blocking direct spend with non-preferred suppliers;6) humming in the background capturing invoice data;7) automating three-way matching of receipt of goods, PO and invoice;8) matching and paying approved invoices.Coupa can also automate the payment of invoices. All of this happens while providing a real-time audit trail. It can also integrate with all sorts of accounting systems, eliminating the duplication of data.
2. Expense Management
Manage expenses and budgets seamlessly and effortlessly with a system that doesn’t need petty cash or company credit cards. Systems such as Rydoo provide an all-in-one expense management software that enables employees to submit expenses by the app, and authorises management to approve or reject claim in seconds. This means shorter reimbursement cycles and less exposure to fraud.
Sector: teams Teampay. Spending controls for teams. Connects with your accounting software and can be managed via Slack. Supports physical and virtual cards. Create controls by category, vendor or amount. Automates receipt capture and coding to your system.
The ultimate expense management tools not only help enforce policy but also automate what can be a tedious back-and-forth about approving reports and reimbursing employees, and help speed up reconciliation. The best tool avoids creating expense silos, providing real-time visibility across purchases, enabling people to see a contextual view of what’s being spent with a reconciliation layer that points out opportunities to cut costs – all made possible by automating approvals and supplier negotiations. Further, the tool helps track subscriptions, flagging upcoming renewals and negotiating better terms. It should support your preferred currency of business operations and be available on either a subscription basis or with a free trial period.
3. Payments
The best spend management tool will have some kind of automation to help monitor and decrease spending. Fortunately, there are many tools that can do just that – a spend management tool like Cledara can benchmark your software purchases with our rich set of data to ensure that you are not overpaying for software that might not even deliver. Or, a spend management tool like Pluto can automate your financial workflows with features such as rich general ledger coding, sales tax tracking, vendor syncing, and more to bring sanity to your accounting madness.
Another great one is Moss, which offers the same full suite of financial operations and expense management software as Marqeta; it sets up a company mobile card on terms of your choosing, and gives you spending analytics from a central dashboard. Expenses can be approved digitally and receipts become searchable OCR data, massively speeding up admin.
Still another is the unified Spend Management solution by Lumos which provides intelligent automation to increase efficiency and accuracy. This allows you to have complete control over your procurement activities, eliminating waste and increasing transparency. The fabric solution also supports rich analytics to identify cost-saving opportunities and drive strategies to optimise costs. Additionally, this fabric solution integrates with your existing systems and tools to not disrupt your existing processes. Unlike other tools where a different tool has to be built for different activities such as account payables, card spending and employee reimbursements, everything in this tool is handled from a single platform.
