Breaking the age-old myth of manual v automated spend management

Are you stuck in the monopoly of your business processes played by your operations?

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat.?Spend management earns no revenue.?Sure, it has an impact on business development and ultimately on the bottom line, and therefore deserves your attention from those points alone – but in itself it’s an admin task, and therefore should be accomplished to the highest possible standard in the shortest possible time.

And that must mean your business should be automating the process so as not to make it an unnecessary drain on resources.?If you’re still unconvinced, consider the following story, which, despite how improbable it sounds, I insist is true.

The story is about recording overtime, but for every mention of the work ‘overtime’, if you substitute ‘expense management’ you’ll see why it interests me, as the creator of an expense management app used by customers in almost 100 countries.

The story concerns the multi-national company with thousands of employees recording on a spreadsheet the overtime worked in at least one department.?That translates into one employee having to enter the overtime worked by about 600 colleagues, spreadsheet cell by painful spreadsheet cell.?No matter how alarmingly time consuming that sounds –?and you must agree that it is, it’s just one stage of a necessarily long-winded and potentially error-prone process.

1.?????Firstly, the employees have to record how much overtime they’ve worked

2.?????Those numbers have to be signed off by supervisors

3.?????Supervisors pass them to the individual who compiles the overtime spreadsheet

4.?????The spreadsheet is passed through to payroll

5.?????Payroll adjust salaries to take account of the overtime

6.?????Finance records the overtime worked against the right line on the departmental budget

Quite apart from the time, the potential for error brought on by multiple data entry is enormous.?And since overtime payments are open to ‘guesstimation’, with the addition of an hour or so here or there, also accounts to fraud.

And if this company continues to keep playing by the 'set rules' its likely to lose millions with its well practiced and adapted manual expense management.

Wouldn’t it make infinitely more sense, then, to automate the process??It’s hardly rocket science.?The technology exists.?Overtime worked could be entered and approved just once, and then the tech could take over, automatically adjusting salaries with payroll and recording the figures in the departmental budget.

And here’s the thing.?Process automation for tasks like these costs very little, and certainly less than the salaries paid to the people doing the data entry, or the errors they generate within the process. Let me shock you with this - Prices start from GBP 1/USD 1/EUR 1/AUD 2/INR 35

Savings made are ongoing, year-on-year, opening up other spend management options.?Perhaps it would mean a reduction in headcount, sad though that would be for the individuals involved.?Or how about redeploying them onto tasks that actually earn revenue for the company, enhancing profitability and making the whole organisation more competitive??Is that too much of a leap of faith brought on by opening the mind to the possibilities that there is a more cost-effective and accurate way of doing something by harnessing the power of automation offered by 21st century technology.

Take a chance. Start your?free trial today or book a demo to get started

?The writer has founded ExpenseOnDemand with a vision to enable companies to lead a paperless and a hassle-free business process by offering a smart, simple, & intuitive expense management solution.

Sunil NIGAM?bolstered the technology base & aced the business model to make solutions affordable to everyone – at $1/user/month, making it the most trusted cloudbased application by SMBs of over 96 countries..and perhaps the best expenses app in the universe!

Find out more on?https://www.expenseondemand.com/?or follow?ExpenseOnDemand's official LinkedIn page?to keep yourself updated.