Certify has written an eBook on T&E best practices for manufacturing companies. You can download it for free here.
Manufacturing decision-makers should always be looking for opportunities to increase profitability and reduce financial risks.
Switching from manual to automatic expense reporting is key to achieving better spend visibility and reducing inefficiencies. Decision-makers who can leverage electronic systems better understand where spend is going and have the opportunity to keep their company financially viable.
Not only that, they have improved visibility to look at industry compliance and T&E expense policy enforcement. Here are a few ways finance teams can leverage all that new data:
Conduct audits to confirm expenses and invoices are in policy
High-quality expense tracking software automatically performs audits on out-of-policy expenses, so you can catch erroneous expenses that your team may not have otherwise had time to.
For example, Certify's client Saddle Creek Logistics Services discovered $40,000 in duplicate and out-of-policy charges after automating.
This freed up the company to create and enforce better expense policies and decide where to channel all of those saved expenses.
Analyze newly automated and digitized data
According to a 2019 survey conducted by Certify, 29% of organizations manually check each expense to enforce T&E policies. Tracking company expense trends with an analytics dashboard will allow your team to make strategic decisions about where spend should go. It gives you unprecedented visibility into employees’ habits, allowing for a bird’s eye view that no CFO should go without.
Suss out common trends where overspending occurs
Once you have a greater view of your company’s spending trends, you can easily pinpoint where overspending occurs and course-correct accordingly.
For example, you may be surprised to find that your team is spending more on hotel and airfare than the industry standard. As a result, you may decide to implement expense tracking software that only allows employees to book from a policy-compliant travel app, selecting exclusively from pre-approved vendors and price points. This also allows your company to negotiate better rates with select hotels and services.
Create and integrate new policies that ensure your company's financial future
Switching to an automated system will reduce the time spent on manual inputting and allow your team to work on important initiatives. It also gives unprecedented new levels of visibility into spend and offers the hard data you need to integrate new T&E expense policies.
With improved capacities across the board, the possibilities are endless. You'll have the opportunity to be seen as a strategic safeguard, someone who's able to look at the big picture and protect the company from unnecessary risks.