Let’s face it: manually managing expenses can feel like a never-ending battle against a mountain of receipts and invoices. Automation can be a source of relief and a path to more efficient workflows, improved productivity and happier employees. You’re also more likely to be compliant with expense policies and detect fraudulent activity more quickly.
Below, we’ll cover the essential steps to ditch outdated manual uploading, chasing paper receipts, blocked cards and zero spend oversight.
Expense management automation is the use of digital tools and software to simplify the process of tracking, reporting and reimbursing employee expenses.
Replacing manual processes with automation makes finance teams more efficient, reduces human error and increases productivity.
Finance teams no longer have to spend hours chasing invoices and matching receipts, trying to stay on top of employee spending. It can all be done in one place with automated expense management.
Also, with the integration of multiple digital solutions you can address other key issues in your operations. For example, you can:
Automating your expense management processes solves multiple issues that are common to modern businesses. For example, piles of paper receipts, lost invoices and tired, frustrated employees are but a few of the challenges that make manually tracking expenses time-consuming and inefficient.
Add to that errors in data entry from hard-to-read receipts and inaccurate expense reports and you’ve got a process that takes up way too much time. Plus, it drags your finance team away from more important tasks such as budgeting for the next quarter.
Manual expense management also means that finance reports often can’t be delivered until the end of each month, which makes a complete picture of employee spending almost impossible. Managers can’t approve budgets or expense reports until employees have already been waiting weeks for reimbursement.
After all that work, it’s still difficult to know if all your data is correct, if you’ve been compliant with employee expense policies or avoided fraudulent activity.
Next, we look at how to implement automation across your business so you can reduce costs, avoid shadow spend, and operate more efficiently.
Below we’ll take you through the steps you can take to automate your expense management processes.
Conduct a thorough assessment of your current expense management processes. Some questions to ask during this review are:
Include any team that has access to company funds in this process. Each team member will have a different perspective on what is lacking in your current expense management process and will help you create a complete picture of what they need to be more efficient.
Blocked cards, low spending limits, and media teams buying from different accounts — sound familiar? Digital commerce teams need an automated solution that’s flexible enough to keep track of ad spend, inventory spend and vendor expenses across multiple currencies.
Imagine your marketing team is trying to launch a new ad campaign and their card is denied. Meanwhile, you know there's excessive spend across your product and R&D teams, even though you've implemented strict guidelines on limits and approvals. But not only are you unable to identify where your cash is haemorrhaging from, it’s impossible to know if you’re about to hit a spending limit that will prevent you from making any big payments over the next week.
By integrating an expense management software like Juni, you’ll be able to manage payments across multiple accounts and currencies in one dashboard, get a real-time overview of expenses, and centralise your operations and spend controls.
If your business growth depends on liquidity, you can also tap into Juni's multiple financing and cash flow solutions, so you can strategise further into the future as you invest more in media buying, UX tools. You might run an ecommerce business that relies heavily on cash flow to purchase inventory, forcing your finance team to plan carefully. Juni allows EEA customers to finance their inventory invoices with fees as low as 3%, freeing up capital and boosting growth as a result.
Finance your invoices with Juni Capital
A clear and well-crafted employee expense policy lets teams work more efficiently with the freedom to make decisions about spending within the boundaries you set.
Your policy should include the following:
Identify the most common expenses your employees incur. For example, if your team uses software like an email marketing tool, you can list recommended software and set a maximum monthly budget. With Juni, you can implement custom limits and permissions with as many cards as your team needs.
Your policy should be standardised and easily accessible by all employees. Make sure it’s kept up-to-date as your business grows and keep the language simple and free of technical jargon.
Skip the manual data entry and paper receipts by implementing automated receipt and invoice workflows. Automation reduces the chances of data entry errors, speeds up the reconciliation process and increases compliance with employee expense policies.
Your employees can take a quick snap of their receipts within the Juni app or forward them into a dedicated inbox and Juni will take care of the rest. If you’re missing an invoice, simply send a reminder to your team from a centralised platform. Juni scans invoices and pre-fills payment information so you can settle everything in a few clicks. You’ll also avoid late payment fees and manually uploading invoices with the ability to forward all invoices to a dedicated Juni inbox.
Automating your receipt and invoice workflows will allow you to do the same for your approvals processes. Once an employee uploads their receipts, customisable automations allow businesses to set up rules and approvals that match your operational needs. Identify the appropriate personnel in the approvals chain and assign approvals automatically to them. You can cut out employee reimbursements entirely since the approvals process happens almost instantaneously.
Regular monitoring and reviews of your processes help identify spending patterns, gaps in compliance and provide insights that allow you to make data-driven decisions. As your business grows so too will the need to review and refine your processes to accommodate for higher spending, bigger budgets and more employees who need access to company funds.
Juni offers a range of tools and integrations designed to optimise expense management, making it easier for your team to streamline financial processes, reduce manual effort and enhance cash flow.
More accurate accounts, faster month-ends thanks to integrations with accounting software like Fortnox and automatic approvals processes mean fewer data entry errors associated with manual expense management.
For example, Juni lets you centralise media spend and reconciliation, eliminating the need to log into Meta, pay invoices there and then upload them into whatever tool you use. Instead, Juni automatically pulls Meta invoices and you can choose to pay them immediately or get financing to pay them later.
All your financial information is available in one dashboard, centralising all your spend management capabilities. Businesses can understand their expenses in different categories and different time periods saving significant amounts of time on manually tracking and monitoring spend across departments.
Less repetition, more predictability and no more bottlenecks. Set up customisable approvals processes that make reconciliations almost instantaneous. Your employees don’t have to wait for their receipts to be manually uploaded, with the Juni app they can scan their receipts and upload them directly themselves for approval. Less time spent tracking down receipts means more time to get to the end of that to-do list you’ve been staring at for a week.
You can also earn cashback on all eligible spend with Juni. Rates are tailored to your pricing plan and no action is needed to earn cashback. It will be automatically added to your account once the cashback period has ended.
Juni offers capital and lending that frees up cash flow for modern businesses that have limited cash tied up in inventory or media buying.¹
Flexible credit lines on cards can be spent on ad campaigns with fixed monthly fees. With Juni you’ve got more time to settle your invoices and more negotiation room with your suppliers.
Before they partnered with Juni, Savvy Moves faced two challenges: manual accounting processes and no centralised financial oversight. They spent hours manually matching receipts and had no good way to manage their spend.
So the team used Juni to enhance their cash flow visibility, reduce errors in the receipt matching process and save 20 hours per quarter on financial admin.
“We chose Juni to enhance our cash flow visibility, consolidate money in and money out with a single dashboard, and reduce the reliance on manual accounting processes,” says Rémon de Muijnck, Co-Founder of Savvy Moves.
Automating your expense management processes can revolutionise how your finance team operates. A tool like Juni helps eliminate manual errors, gain real-time visibility over your spending and create smoother workflows. Your employees will be happier too because they don’t have to spend hours on tedious manual receipt matching.
Juni offers solutions for modern businesses by helping you manage expenses seamlessly, control costs with low FX fees, and unlock additional cash flow through financing options.
Juni helps finance teams automate their expense management by offering real-time visibility into employee spending, automatic receipt matching and customising approvals workflows.
Look for a software that offers real-time spend oversight, receipt matching, integrations with accounting software and virtual cards with customisable spending limits.
Yes. Juni integrates with accounting software like Fortnox as well as storefronts such as Shopify, Amazon and Meta. Get a centralised view of all your stores with real-time data and insights all in one dashboard.
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