In a fiercely competitive market, having used most of the marketing strategies, such as the right product, right pricing, right promotion, and right placement, one of the last few things you must do to win the competition is reducing your costs—one of which is optimizing your business expenses.
New businesses spend an average of $40,000 in their first year. If they don’t track this whopping amount, they risk losing valuable insights into their financial performance and making informed decisions for future growth.
Luckily, the digital transformation age has brought some incredible digital solutions to optimizing many business expenses. From business travel expenses and payrolls to business subscriptions and day-to-day expenses, all can be managed in one place, giving you a bird’s eye view so that you can optimize them.
This article discusses 4 business expense optimization tools that users love. The best features and pricing of each are mentioned.
Want to find abnormalities and discrepancies, and track your business expenses? Let’s get right into it without further ado:
TravelPerk—Corporate Travel Management Tool
If your business operates across borders, you, your partners, or your subordinates must be traveling frequently from your business unit in one country to another in a different country. All on the business’s expenses.
The expenses start from booking flights and accommodation and include many other minor expenses such as breakfasts and snacks.
When the business trip participants return, they bring a mountain of receipts of all incurred expenses during the trip, throwing a manual workload to the concerned department that can contribute to the business valuably otherwise.
Not only does it engage your employees in a manual task that can otherwise be done using some of the spend management solutions, but it also poses the risk of making wrong entries when registering them in your system.
Imagine engaging your employees in a menial task that carries the inevitable risk of manual data entry errors. A bit silly, right?
If you have been doing this, it’s time you must consider employing a travel management software like TravelPerk which optimizes your business travel expenses.
Best Features
1. Travel And Expenses Dashboard: TravelPerk has a comprehensive dashboard that summarizes all the travel expenses incurred. It has multiple filters that break the data down according to the type of transportation used, persons, cancellations, and more.
2. Track Of All Bookings: All of your bookings, such as travel tickets, accommodation, and intra-city transport, are tracked on the platform.
3. Invoice Management: After each trip, all of the expenses are transferred to a single, comprehensive invoice, offering ease in tracking the expenses by each trip and removing the hassle of many little invoices.
4. Cancellation Policy: Last-minute plan changes occur. TravelPerk understands and facilitates that with its easy cancellation policy. No questions are asked and the refunds are processed.
5. Company Travel Policies: TravelPerk lets companies add their company travel policies on the dashboard which helps the travel manager make policy-compliant bookings.
Zimyo—Payroll Management Tool
Salaries are one of the largest business expenses for many labor-intensive companies. Somewhere around 70% is expended on people in many firms.
Being a considerable portion of business expenses, it must be well-optimized. However, many firms have to dedicate 35% of HR’s time to payroll and error correction.
It reflects an opportunity for firms who are doing this mistake. They can save HR’s valuable time to utilize on more concerning issues such as succession plans and employee motivation among others.
All they have to do is employ the right payroll software like Zimyo. With this tool, automating the payrolls makes them less prone to errors that often occur during manual processes.
Best Features
1. Monitoring Expenses: Besides basic pay, employees are usually entitled to many other payments such as reimbursements, allowances, compensations, commissions, and more. Zimyo lets you monitor all these expenses more accurately than your manual monitoring processes.
2. Tracking Expenses: Some of your employees need to travel intercity and intracity to conduct your business. They are allowed reimbursements for fuel consumption. Manually, they would file the claim and you would go through it and decide approval or disapproval. Zimyo provides you with a system of tracking such types of expenses digitally and gives your employees a platform where they can claim their reimbursements. The request is pinged to you where you can approve and disapprove it and the employee is notified. Simple and optimized for both of you, right?
3. Overspending Policies: Zimyo lets you mention the spending policies of your firm which employees can use as their guide to spending. This helps you eliminate overspending. The employees would be clear about the spending limits and would not want to spend more than they are allowed to spend as per your policies.
4. Attendance Calculation: Zimyo can be integrated with your attendance tracking system which automatically calculates the employees’ salaries. It saves you from manual efforts put into salary calculation according to the attendance and leaves of your employees.
Quickbooks—An Accounting Tool
Are you still keeping manual accounting books or using MS Excel for accounting for your firm? Well, no issues in doing that except for a few that you carry a risk of manual errors.
However, can you visualize your expenses in graphs? Yes? By using other visualization tools, right? Again, an opportunity to optimize your business expenses here.
Quickbooks, an accounting software, lets you maintain your accounting books digitally. Not only that, it creates reports and supports real-time collaboration with your tax advisor when the business is near the tax filing time.
It gives you a clear view of your cash flows so that you know what the business is spending on and what cost-cutting measures you must take to optimize your business expenses.
As the data accumulates, it lets you compare your accounting data with the previous terms and helps you know how your business is performing financially.
Quickbooks is essentially a tool for SMEs which have to keep their costs minimal and generate significant profits to survive in the long run.
Best Features
1. Custom Invoices and Quotes: Quickbooks offers a variety of templates to generate custom invoices and quotations that you need to send to your vendors and buyers. You get notified when the payments are received, and Quickbook updates your digital accounts with new entries.
2. Hassle-Free Tax Filing: Filing for taxes is often a hectic task as it requires mentioning most of the cash inflows and outflows, assets, donations, and more. Quickbooks makes it easy because all your business expenses are stored in one place. All you or your tax advisor have to do is transfer the numbers from your Quickbooks account to the tax filing document.
3. Errorless Bank Account Reconciliations: In accounting, you have to match and reconcile the bank account statements and your accounting book entries. Quickbooks lets you connect your bank; it reduces errors and saves you from manual bank account reconciliations.
4. Inventory Management: Quickbook offers inventory management, too. You can track the ins and outs of your inventory in real-time. When you want to restock, you can send a quotation to your vendor for inventory replenishment, directly from Quickbooks.
5. Mobile App: This has to be the best feature as it lets you keep your business in your pocket when you are on the go. For SME owners who are actively engaged in all of their firm’s operations, Quickbooks offers all-time visibility into their business expenses wherever they are.
Brex—All In One Business Expenses Optimization Tool
All the above-mentioned tools were vertically specialized around specific business aspects such as travel management, payroll management, and accounting.
Brex, however, covers a wide spectrum of business aspects and offers optimization of expenses arising out of traveling, daily operations, monthly rents, employee payrolls, and much more.
This tool offers cost-saving to those businesses who can’t afford or manage many tools, each specialized in a different business aspect. They can optimize all business expenses with this single tool.
Best Features
1. Expense Management : Brex lets you monitor and track all your business expenses and reimbursements. its a one type of expense management software.
2. Travel Management: You can monitor your tickets, accommodation, and all other trip-related expenses and invoices with Brex.
3. Brex Corporate Card: It is a credit card offered by Brex, powered by Mastercard, that is accepted all around the globe. You can use this card for all your business travel or day-to-day business expenses. It is integrated with your Brex account and automatically transfers all the expenses to your dashboard.
Optimize Expenses And Succeed
It all comes down to the point of winning the competition and ensuring survivability. If you’re not getting your business’s lifeblood—finances—right, you’re playing a never-ending game of Tetris, trying hard to win the competition.
Right marketing and branding aren’t always all you need to succeed in a market, other matters such as business expenses optimization also need thorough care.
You can provide this thorough care to your business expenses by using the tools described in this article. They help you optimize your expenses, increasing the chances of your business’s success.
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