Expense Management Software Is Important

Mar 31, 2023

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Originally Posted On: https://bentoforbusiness.com/expense-management/expense-management-software-is-important/

Yes! Expense Management Software Is Important. Here’s Why:

Finding Money Where You Weren’t Looking
Discovering Free Time In Your Busy Schedule
Empowering You And Your Team To Work Smarter, Not Harder.
Partner With Bento For Business To Streamline Your Expense Management

Spoiler: expense management software and expense tracking are highly important to any company that wants complete control of its spending.

After all, your business could earn seven, eight, nine, or more figures in sales, and a significant chunk of those revenues could be nullified through overspending.

It’s theoretically possible to keep a more watchful eye on company expenses without a technological solution. However, in practice, though? Well, that’s a different story.

Financial departments have higher-level, bigger-picture facets of their role on which to focus. Getting lost in the weeds trying to track business expenses via manual, non-software-related methods (e.g., compiling receipts, generating reports) distracts from core business functions.

Without the appropriate technology, expense tracking sits in a murky grey area for many businesses.

Yes, all companies acknowledge how vital it is to stay on top of company spending, ensuring it’s strategic, return-oriented, and above board. Yet, without the right tools, the necessary tasks it takes to remain on top of expense tracking can spark its own inefficiencies and do more harm than good.

The result? Organizations don’t end up as profitable as they could be, errantly writing off the money lost as the cost of doing business.

Alternatively, with top-grade expense management software–like what you’ll get with Bento for Business–you’ll find all of your company’s lost money while barely lifting a finger. Instead of chasing down people for receipts and reports, our software does the vital work for you, eliminating your need to:

Cut checks
Reimburse employees
Manage petty cash
Reconcile receipts

Below, we’ll dive deeper into the importance of expense management software and how it can be a crucial, bottom-line-bolstering X-factor for your company.

Finding Money Where You Weren’t Looking

Cash flow issues cause 82% of business failures, highlighting the importance of trimming down unnecessary business costs.

A detrimental cost for many businesses is travel. Organizations often view sending employees on the road as a must–and they’re usually right. Business travel offers a theoretical return with the deals signed and the relationships fostered.

However, it’s not the plane tickets or hotel arrangements that set you back. It’s the spending that goes on in between. It’s the expensive dinners and the lavish bottles of cognac purchased under the guise of networking.

Furthermore, everyday business spending on superfluous B2B solutions, tools, and services can set you back if you’re not careful. Overspending adversely impacts your company and can run it into the ground–even with the best intentions.

How can you prevent overspending? More specifically, how can you keep spending under control at a level you can predict, project, and plan around?

Bento’s expense management software offers spend controls. More to the point, you can create and assign cards based on your business needs. You can also modify spending parameters whenever it’s required.

Here’s a further breakdown of Bento’s spend-control features:

Click only once to turn a card on or off whenever you want. This is crucial when a card is lost or misplaced
Proactively set flexible spending amounts customized to your business’s needs
Limit the cards to workday-only usage
Prevent unauthorized use by limiting merchant categories
Approve international usage as needed to bolster security

Bento’s expense management software reduces our clients’ spending by an average of 15%. We empower you to evolve to our accounting platform and experience our corporate cards and virtual cards. This way, you can say good riddance to antiquated traditional cash and business cards.

The Endless Value Of Real-Time Visibility

The cards we discussed are a vital facet of our software, but they’re parts of a vast sum: our state-of-the-art dashboard.

With our dashboard, you have the luxury of real-time savings visibility. You’ll see this rapid savings growth by setting the necessary controls on your corporate or virtual cards.

By cracking down on unauthorized or unintended spending, you won’t only save cash to sit around and collect dust. You’ll have money left to make strategic investments that drive growth and take your company to the next level.

Furthermore, you gain this real-time visibility with minimal effort. While you remained dialed into your most critical, big-picture projects, your Bento-powered expense tracking and spend management controls function in the background. So, while Bento saves you money, you’re working on initiatives that increase revenues long-term.

The data you receive is also a gift that keeps on giving. On the surface, it’ll help you flag any unusual spending behaviors. Going further, you’ll have the necessary information about your company’s spending to hone a better financial strategy to operate a more profitable company.

Discovering Free Time In Your Busy Schedule

Consider these stats we compiled from Timewatch:

Nearly 40% of survey participants claimed to spend up to 60 minutes daily on meetings and tasks irrelevant to their role.
17% said they waste 2 to 3 hours
32% said they waste up to 2 hours

In a landscape with a wide-sweeping epidemic of impossible workloads, who can afford time-wasting activities in the workplace? For one, you have your well-being to prioritize.

Unsurprisingly, given the impossible workloads of today, burnout is also pervasive in the current professional climate. Thus, today’s workers are more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and all the other pitfalls of lacking a healthy work-life balance.

The above challenges highlight how adding to your workload is often a net negative. On the other hand, finding ways to heighten efficiency, save time, and increase productivity is always a welcome notion. While this combination of benefits might feel like a pipedream in your jam-packed workflow-pipeline schedule, it can be your reality.

You receive all these game-changing benefits with Bento’s expense management solutions.

Specifically, through our dashboard, there’s no need to approve workflows. Also, it only takes a few presses of a mouse to set up unique, custom controls for each card.

Then, there’s the matter of creating and tracking your expense reports. These processes are automated with Bento in real time, as is our proactive transaction monitoring feature.

Removing these processes frees up time for yourself and your employees. This way, workers within your organization can focus on the two most important things: high-value work and personal growth.

Undoubtedly, you want everyone to fire on all cylinders. That can only happen when they’re given tools–like Bento–that reduce impossible workloads and stop the resulting burnout, helping everyone achieve the ideal work-life balance.

Empowering You And Your Team To Work Smarter, Not Harder

We often romanticize the idea of hard work. For whatever reason, pushing ourselves to the brink is associated with strength, drive, and determination.

The commitment it takes to work incredibly hard can’t be overlooked. Yet, it’s not even close to the be-all and end-all.

Pushing ourselves too hard carries a law of diminishing returns. Everybody within an organization benefits from leaving enough energy in the tank to reduce stress and maintain mental clarity. Thus, working smart should be romanticized and celebrated–not working hard.

Taking it one step further, employees working too hard limits the results yielded for your company. One example of hard work gone wrong is getting stuck in mundane, menial tasks that could be performed more efficiently.

With expense management–when you lack the appropriate tools–you could find yourself working way too hard to organize expense reports and receipts. Moreover, creating the expense reports themselves is a demanding task in and of itself. Data wrangling and storage can also run you ragged and pull you in a thousand directions.

These are all necessary tasks if you wish to excel at expense management. The kicker is you don’t need to work so hard at it–not with Bento’s AI-based receipt capture and high-efficiency reporting tools.

Our expense management software gives you one central storage space for receipt and expense reports.

Furthermore, we offer automated expense reporting, and our tech is compatible with Quickbooks and other accounting platforms. So, you can seamlessly export your expense-related data.

Bento’s cutting-edge AI functionality ensures you and your employees don’t expend your efforts working too hard on administrative tasks.

Conversely, our AI feature allows teams to “work smart” and produce more expense management-related results with minimal effort. AI reduces human error, giving an accurate snapshot of your savings (or lack thereof).

Lastly, Bento makes closing your books a hassle-free, effortless process. Once more, the automated tech increases bookkeeping accuracy and reliability while making jobs more manageable.

Partner With Bento For Business To Streamline Your Expense Management

You’ve worked too hard at your business to let something like inefficient spending chisel away at your bottom line.

So, say goodbye to the frivolous expenditures that don’t suit your business’s needs and jump head-first into streamlined expense management and tracking. All it takes is one discussion with Bento to get things started. From there, we’ll learn about your business and explain how our solution can save you time, money, and effort.