Expense Tracking Software Trends in 2022 That is Here to Stay
In particular, millennials and Gen Z employees have little patience for shufflinsg receipts by hand. Suppose your organization is still operating in manual mode. In that case, you are wasting everyone’s time, not to mention potentially slowing down audits, ignoring policy violations and fraud, and maybe violating IRS deductibility laws.
Finance teams may not see the value in investing time and money in on-premises expenditure management solutions because they haven’t kept up with the evolving business needs. A manual expenditure management procedure gets more burdensome when workers are not in the office. Using cloud-based Expense tracking software makes it much easier to track expenses from any location.
New capabilities have been delivered as a result of technological breakthroughs. Employees and the accounting team, who must manage the approval and payment process across all departments and employees, can benefit from automated solutions, the cloud, and machine learning to speed up the cost management process and reduce frustration.
1. Adaptability
Employees want to make reports on their mobile devices, then input, track, and submit their spending. While choosing expense reporting software, mobile applications and integration should be a top priority.
This pattern is likely to persist. When on-the-go professionals can conduct cost reporting chores on the fly—for now at home, but soon over lunch, in a hotel room, in the back of an Uber, or on the flight home—not only does the employee save time, but it also speeds up back-office invoicing and financial reconciliation.
There are three more features to look for in mobile cost management solutions:
- Integration with travel-booking and itinerary-planning apps is available.
- GPS capabilities allow you to auto-fill expense entries based on your current location, such as an airport or a restaurant.
- Industry-specific features, for instance, mobile currency conversion for multinational corporations.
2. Travel
As businesses rethink business travel in the post-pandemic era, the necessity for accurate spending tracking will persist. Finance teams can implement new policies and monitor compliance with an automated expenditure management solution to ensure that employees are not abusing the reimbursement system and take swift remedial action if they are. Simply notifying managers in near real-time to notify individual employees if they are spending more than they will help prevent problems. The same may be said for many companies’ new work-from-home policy.
3. Integration
Employees and finance benefit from integrating expenditure management with ERP and other accounting systems.
Integrated expense tracking software solutions remove the majority of the friction from a traditionally lengthy and expensive process by integrating various T&E data and automatically exchanging it with a company’s ERP and other systems.
Look for built-in connectors with your accounting system, the ability to link policies and guardrails into any trip booking tools, the capacity to granularly report on T&E spending, and compliance support.
4. Expense Management with AI, Automation, and Machine Learning
Machine learning algorithms examine a large amount of data and learn from it. A corporation can send a year’s worth of expense reports into an ML-enabled T&E system to train it to recognize abnormalities that could suggest fraud or human mistakes. The more reports the system examines, the better it will detect potential issues.
The distinction between machine learning and artificial intelligence is that machine learning looks at good and bad samples and learns how to recognize the bad—AI ups the ante by adding extra context.
Bottom Line
If you are still sending spreadsheets via email and collecting paper receipts, make 2022 the year you catch up by investing in a reasonable Expense tracking software.
