Effective and automated expense management helps to grow business
One of the lessons many companies learn the hard way is the potential perils of business growth. It’s estimated that 74% of start-up failures can be attributed to ‘premature scaling’.
It’s a result of the various stresses and strains that are placed on an organisation at it starts to grow in scale and complexity. Systems and processes that worked fine for a smaller company, begin to collapse as the company scales-up.
A classic example of this is the way that the management of employee expenses can rapidly become an uncontrollable area of company finances. If it’s not tackled, it can stifle business growth.
A 2017 global survey, commissioned by Webexpenses, found that 42% of office workers admit to having falsified or exaggerated their mileage claims. This contributes to the $373 million that’s lost each year by Australian businesses to workplace fraud.
Workplace expense fraud
It’s a problem that’s so common that many workers don’t perceive the ‘fiddling’ of expenses as being dishonest. A typical comment from a survey respondent was, “I don’t claim for anything crazy, just add a few extra miles onto journeys.”
This kind of normalisation of expense fraud is a consequence of businesses not having the resources or management tools required to properly monitor and enforce expense policies.
While increasing numbers of Australian businesses have moved across to expense management software, the majority still use the traditional approach – relying on paper receipts, Excel spreadsheets and manual data entry.
It creates a slow and inefficient way of working which becomes harder to manage as the organisation grows. Finance teams find themselves so focused on trying to process a monthly surge of paperwork that they’re unable to properly police claims.
Built for growth
It’s a scalability problem that’s solved by moving to a digital expense management system such as Webexpenses. This provides a fully scalable way of working which is just as effective handling the costs of five or five thousand employees.
It’s able to do this by combining cloud-based software with an integrated smartphone app, allowing any paper processes to be virtually eliminated. It typically reduces processing times by 25% and significantly cuts error and fraud losses.
The smartphone app allows employees to instantly convert any paper receipt they receive into a digital form, as well as unlocking the ability to accurately record any road journey distances.
Access to real-time information allows the system to automatically check each claim that’s made and to trigger an alert whenever costs are found to be outside any parameters that have been set by the finance team.
Expense management software solution
It’s this combination of increased efficiency and more powerful ways to monitor and track company costs that effectively future-proofs a company’s expense management setup. It provides a robust system with the flexibility to evolve and expand along with a business.
With the mark of a successful company being the way it’s able to handle growth, the time has come for more Australian companies to make the switch to expense management software.
Webexpenses provides a smarter way to manage employee expenses. Find out how it can help your business handle growth by requesting a demo.
