The Ultimate Buyer’s Guide to Enterprise Expense Management Software 2024

Managing business expenses efficiently is critical for companies to control costs, maintain compliance, and promote productivity. However, organisations often need help with manual, disjointed processes for expense reporting, approvals, reimbursement, and accounting. This leads to errors, policy violations, lack of visibility, and frustrated employees wasting hours on paperwork.

Companies spend about half a million dollars and 3,000 hours processing and correcting expense reports yearly. Each expense report costs an extra $52 to fix. This is according to the Global Business Travel Association.

A study on employee attitudes towards expense reports found that:

This whitepaper provides a comprehensive guide to selecting automated expense management systems to help enterprises transform their spend management processes’ efficiency, accuracy, and transparency.

It covers the key challenges and considerations around features, deployment, user experience, and integrations when evaluating expense management solutions. Guidelines are provided across critical buying stages – from defining goals and requirements to comparing options, pilot testing, and implementation. Supplier comparison tables and sample ROI calculations further inform solution evaluation.

Equipped with the recommendations in this whitepaper, finance, HR, and IT leaders can kickstart their project to implement an automated expense management system that maximises value across their organisation. The time to tackle this costly issue is now.

The Challenges of Expense Management

Expense management presents a wide range of challenges that significantly impact finance teams, managers, employees, and the broader organisation:

For Employees:

Manual processes like collecting receipts, filling forms, chasing approvals, and creating reports take up an average of 18 hours per month per employee. According to The Hackett Group, this equates to a staggering loss of $1800 per employee annually in productivity.

Out-of-pocket spending and long reimbursement delays create financial burdens for employees. It takes 5-7 business days on average to get reimbursed, according to KPMG. This leads to cash flow issues and lower job satisfaction.

Lack of visibility into report status after submission leaves employees in the dark. They need transparency to correct errors or comply with exceptions. This causes frustration.

For Finance Teams:

Processing paper reports and receipts manually could be more efficient, requiring massive administrative overheads. Finance staff get bogged down in mundane tasks.

According to a 2023 survey by KPMG, 78% of companies have experienced compliance challenges with expense reporting. KPMG also found that the average cost of an expense reporting compliance violation is $22,000.

Poor integration between expense systems and ERPs like SAP SuccessFactors results in inaccurate accounting – wrong cost centres, GL codes, etc. This creates reconciliation nightmares.

For Managers:

Spending hours reviewing and approving expense reports takes away from more strategic work and core management responsibilities. This directly impacts their productivity.

Analysing costs and identifying violations across voluminous line items to control spending is extremely easy with automated insights. Budget overruns happen easily.

Lack of alerts around duplicate claims, policy violations, and other issues leads to leakages. Managers are forced to play catch-up during periodic reviews.

How Software Can Help?

Automated expense management software provides solutions to the myriad challenges of manual expense processing:

For Employees:

Intuitive mobile apps let employees snap photos of receipts and submit expenses on the go. This eliminates collecting and compiling paper receipts. An IDC study shows that mobile receipt capture increased employee participation in expense reporting by over 40%.

Configurable workflows ensure compliance and optimise approvals using automated routing based on customisable business rules and policies. Software like Reimburse auto-creates rulesets.

Real-time status tracking provides complete visibility into the approval process through mobile notifications. Employees get alerted instantly of any exceptions or issues. This can increase first-time approval rates by over 15%, according to a 2022 report by KPMG.

For Finance Teams:

AI-powered receipt data extraction and smart OCR technology automate expense report population with up to 90% accuracy. This eliminates manual data entry and improves record accuracy.

Continuous multi-point audits flag policy violations, duplicate claims and potential fraud. This enforces compliance and reduces risks. According to a 2023 study by KPMG, 78% of companies that use automated audits have seen reduced expense reporting fraud.

Seamless ERP integrations push approved expenses directly into accounting systems like SAP SuccessFactors in real time. This streamlines reconciliation and eliminates mismatches.

For Managers:

Configurable rules auto-approve compliant expenses and intelligently route only exceptions for manager review. This saves managers up to 4 hours per week previously spent on approvals.

Custom reporting and analytics powered by AI provide insights into spending patterns, budget vs actuals, and more to inform data-driven decisions.

Machine learning algorithms identify high-risk transactions, duplicate claims, and outliers for further checks. This reduces compliance gaps.

Overview of Key Considerations

Selecting the right expense management solution involves evaluating options across a range of factors:

Buying Considerations

When evaluating expense management solutions, organisations should consider several factors

What Your Stakeholders Want?

When evaluating expense management solutions, it is crucial to understand the needs and priorities of key stakeholder groups within an organisation:

Understanding the perspectives of these buyer personas allows solution providers to tailor their offerings to meet the needs of all stakeholders. The right software should streamline expense reporting for employees, provide visibility and control for finance, enable flexibility for IT, and give insights to managers. Keeping these personas in mind ensures a holistic solution.

Buying Process Stages

Selecting a new expense management system involves a journey moving through several stages:

Solution Overview

Leading expense management solutions provide capabilities to automate time-consuming manual processes and provide visibility into spending. Key features include:

Together, these capabilities act like an expert sherpa, guiding organisations to the peak of streamlined expense management. Finance teams are equipped to overcome challenges like non-compliance, report errors, and lack of visibility. The result is winning the race to the summit of financial control and efficiency.

Product Comparison

When evaluating expense management solutions, comparing features and capabilities in a table format is helpful. Below is a high-level comparison between Reimburse and key competitors:

Getting Started

Implementing a new expense management system requires thoughtful planning and execution. Here are some best practices:

Pricing Models and Metrics

When evaluating expense management solutions, it’s important to consider the pricing model and associated metrics. Here are some of the most common options:

When selecting a model, considerations include predictability of costs, ease of adding users, inclusion of all required features, and flexibility to increase usage over time without escalating pricing. The right model best fits an organisation’s size, needs, and growth trajectory.

Conclusion

Managing corporate spending and expenses is increasingly complex and critical in today’s business environment. Outdated, manual processes expose organisations to risks of fraud, policy violations, and limited visibility into costs. Modern, automated expense management solutions can help transform this challenge into a strategic advantage.

The right software provides digital workflows, enforces configurable policies, and enables integration into core financial systems. This eliminates paper-based processes to speed up expense reporting and reimbursements. Employees can capture expenses through user-friendly mobile apps. Configurable rules and continuous auditing promote compliance with spending guidelines, while custom analytics offer visibility into spending patterns.

Companies can achieve significant cost savings, productivity gains, and process efficiency with the proper solution tailored to their needs. The benefits span multiple stakeholders – from finance teams to individual managers and employees. As expense management becomes more strategic, organisations must view software selection as an investment toward stronger financial control. Thorough planning, stakeholder input, and change management will maximise the value and ROI of their chosen system.

With a solution like Reimburse purpose-built for SAP systems and SuccessFactors, organisations can equip their finance teams with the right technologies to optimise spend management. Automating mundane tasks allows focus on more impactful initiatives. Painless integrations with enterprise platforms maximise existing infrastructure while easy-to-use mobile features drive employee adoption. The result is spending efficiency, compliance, and agility accelerated across the business.

The time is now to evaluate proven expense management solutions that translate into bottom-line savings and strategic advantage. Delay no further – contact the experts at Reimburse today to schedule a demo and discuss how automating expense management can transform your business!