Cost increases create many challenges for individuals and businesses alike. For small businesses, rising costs can be especially troubling, as they put increasing amounts of pressure to do more with less on teams that are often already under-resourced. While the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose only 6.8 per cent in the year to February 2023, an eight per cent decrease compared to 7.4 per cent in January means high costs continue to challenge businesses.
The idea of working smarter, not harder, has always been appealing to smaller businesses, especially those that have experience improving their existing resources to create moments of opportunity that help their businesses run better. When it comes to business expenses, working smart is an essential skillset, particularly for smaller organisations that don’t have the luxury of extensive teams to manage comprehensive spreadsheets and datasets like their big business counterparts.
As a result, digital expense management solutions have emerged as an effective tool to help businesses maintain profitability while reducing potential financial risks.
Streamline spend with smart solutions
As with many business challenges in the modern age, there are digital solutions that can help ease the burden on small businesses and help them achieve greater expense efficiencies, even on lean teams and budgets.
The latest expense management solutions let businesses achieve greater control over their spend without increasing costs or headcount exponentially. Using smart expense management solutions let businesses automate and digitise expense management processes that previously relied on cumbersome paper-based practices.
By transitioning towards a digital expense management solution, businesses can streamline the expense capture and submission process, while simultaneously creating digital paper trails for all expenses. This not only gives employees and management real-time access into expenses; it also helps businesses improve compliance and create digital records for any potential audits. Bolstering expense processes with digital solutions also ensures businesses can take steps towards detecting and reducing potential fraud through their expense claims processes.
A digital expense solution lets employees capture and record expenses in real-time, without needing to collect and attach paper-based receipts for claims. This gives businesses access to spend information as early as possible for more meaningful insight into forecasting and budgets. This is critical information to help businesses make better decisions based on real-time, accurate spend data including effective management of cash flow.
At the same time, it also lets businesses reduce potential errors and duplication that are often associated with manual expense processes. Transitioning to a digital expense management process can significantly decrease the amount of administration time that teams spend on submitting and processing expense claims. This lets businesses free up resources that would otherwise be spending time manually reviewing expense claims, improving productivity, and letting employees pivot into other high-value business tasks. More broadly, this also helps to contribute to a more empowered company culture.
Ultimately, one of the biggest benefits from smart expense solutions is the capability transform and become a more agile business. Finance leaders play an increasingly critical role in improving business success and performance, especially in times of economic volatility and uncertainty. As such, its essential they have the tools and resources at their disposal to make smarter business decisions. Digital expense solutions are an essential part of this journey.
