The benefits of expense management within the coffee industry

from our Australia office

Australia and New Zealand now have a coffee market that is estimated to be pulling in over 56 billion AUD in revenue, making it clear to see that businesses in the coffee industry are developing at a fast rate. And what does it mean when businesses grow? Owners and managers are faced with increasingly complex tasks including tracking spending, inventory, reimbursements, accounting, and other processes in expense management.

Expense management systems can help make this process simple, orderly, and efficient. So why should coffee companies implement an expense management system?

Two of our clients, Allpress Espresso and Underground Coffee Roasters, conducted case studies on the benefits of using an expense management system in their industry.  Here are three improvements they experienced by implementing an expense management system:

1.  Simplicity for claimants

Business owners and managers in the coffee industry often have to manage multiple locations, suppliers, and employees. That is why simplicity is reported by 65% of businesses as their number one must-have feature of their expense management system.

These systems streamline multiple, complex cross-border transactions into one user-friendly software package, freeing up the time and space for business owners to focus on higher-level tasks.

Underground Coffee Roasters on what different users loved about the expense management system:

Our team members love how they can take a picture of their receipt at the moment and upload it straight into the Webexpenses app to start building their claim. This saves them so much time. It’s also reduced the time our finance team spends on the expenses process. Approvers can easily approve or reject claims, so they only have to check and give final sign-off before payments are made.

2. Organised expenses

With all your information streamlined, an analytical system can order your data into easily digestible numbers that can help you make more accurate forecasts. This is an important factor with “employee’s losing paper receipts” and “employees failure to submit reports on time,” being two of the top pain points for businesses.

Underground Coffee Roasters on their biggest challenge when it came to expense management:

The main challenge I faced was retaining all the receipts. I do multiple out-of-town trips within the space of a month so filing receipts for everything from a coffee to accommodation, to rental cars was tricky! Also, time consumption, having to manually reconcile, order and explain so many receipts against a paper statement did not feel like a good use of my time.

3. Increased efficiency with an automated process

As the business grows, you’ll be managing more inventory, more employees, and possible more store locations. As the expense management system brings simplicity and order to individual processes, it will improve the overall efficiency of your business.

Custom report and tracking features help business owners manage inventory and sales across multiple store locations. This creates an excellent opportunity to improve your forecasting management and the autonomy of your employees.

Allpress Espresso on the most useful feature using expense management software:

The Webexpenses app is fantastic. Our team members have given us great feedback around Webexpenses’ latest claim building functionality. For the finance team, it’s great that they can run reports based on the users, categories and cost centres. Plus, the duplication check is another key area for us.

Conclusion

Consider integrating the right expense management system in your business by asking yourself: Can I create a simple, orderly, and efficient process by implementing this system?

In fact, 27% of businesses plan to make the switch from a manual system to a cloud-based system within the next 12 months. As a result of increased simplicity, order, and efficiency, they will be able to achieve their full ROI in a short time period. Not only is it less costly to process expense reports with a cloud-based system, but it also leaves room for better decision-making, improved process flow, and happier employees.