Managing your employee expenses and ensuring the department budgets are not going overboard.
It’s a crucial part of having better control over the financial workflows and holding accountability across the teams.
If you depend on manual or outdated processes, it causes situations like overspending, delays, or errors, leading the company to lose money, potential, and growth.
This is where real-time expense tracking is needed. The tech-driven solution streamlines the process of a financial team.
However, to know more, here is what you should start with.
Table of Contents:
What does Real-Time Expense Tracking mean?
Real-time expense tracking is a modern approach for providing instant visibility to financial management.
It also helps HR to understand spending patterns as soon as they occur. Unlike traditional methods where you depend on monthly and quarterly reports.
The modern approach comes with real-time tracking to monitor the expenses, enabling the managers to make proactive decisions and adjustments to budget allocations.
How Does Real-Time Expense Tracking Help in Better Budget Control?
Many organizations depend on traditional expansion tracking methods, but these come with certain challenges, slowing down the financial process and inaccurate insights.
Here is how having real-time expense tracking can benefit you:
Adding Control Over Budgeting
Having a real time expense can help you in understanding patterns in spending and more visibility for precise budget control.
Companies using the technology and tool help in reducing up to 23% of administration costs.
Also, it helps in:
- Providing financial insights in real time to HR teams so they can monitor the expenses.
- Also, it up to date the data prevents issues like overspending and having better resource allocation to meet the goals.
- Real-time tracking also allows you to identify financial discrepancies at an early stage.
- This enables them to make proactive decisions and corrective actions to diffuse any issue before it escalates.
- Optimization in resource allocation gets efficiency from analyzing live expense data and reallocating it to where it’s needed the most.
- HR teams can benefit from live dashboards and automated alerts based on teams or categories, also flag if there are any inconsistencies and better accountability of every rupee spent.
Make Employee Experience Better
Employee satisfaction is tied to how your organization is managing the reimbursement and its financial processes.
Real-time expense tracking provides a smooth experience for employees, ensuring:
- The automated system can process the reimbursement much faster, providing instant and out-of-pocket costs for employees.
- The mobile-friendly platforms allow employees ease in submitting their expenses anytime and anywhere. It reduces the friction that causes fractions using a traditional method.
- Also, it adds transparency in the process of submitting, monitoring and reimbursement, cutting down on delays and administrative fractions.
Ensure Compliance with Policy & Reduce Risks
Real-time systems for expense tracking come equipped with tools like automated policy checks.
Having a Real-Time Expense Tracking solution helps administrations achieve a 28% reduction in overall expense processing cost as compared to manual methods.
- This makes sure the expenses are valid as soon as they get submitted.
- Expenses can get reviewed instantly while being adhered to the internal policy.
- Also, it does not require a manual intervention, saving you time and errors.
- Having automated expense tracking helps in finding any suspicious transactions or duplicate claims. They get flagged automatically which reduces the risks and financial frauds.
- The process reduces out-of-policy claims and human errors, lowering the chances of internal fraud.
- In the case of audits, you have access to traceable and clean records along with insights and up to data.
Data-Driven Workforce Planning & Training
Real-time expense Tracking data offers more than cost tracking; it also informs in ensuring better decision making for the workplace.
- Real-time tracking allows you to analyze the trends and understand travel patterns, training cost and remote work reimbursements.
- It provides insights to place resources in a much more strategic way, optimizing the L & D investment and adjusting policies based on real time data.
- Access to detailed financial data helps in making it much easier and accurate to forecast budgets, training programs and offer better employee benefits.
5 Steps to Implement Real-Time Expense Tracking
To have a successful implementation in real-time expense tracking, here are the steps to follow.
Step 1: Assess Your Current Process
Before you start to use real-time tracking, first start with evaluating the current system and what it’s lacking.
It can require a clear approval chain, reducing time or accurate expense report and faster reimbursement take.
Having an identifying bottleneck and setting benchmarks for improvement.
Step 2: Define The Expense Policies
A real-time tracking system should have the policies it enforces, so start with having the defined categories, pre-approval requirements, limits on reimbursements, and guidelines for receipt submissions.
Also make sure the policies are digitized and built into the system for auto validating the expenses as soon as the submission happens.
Step 3: Choose the Right Features & Tools
When choosing your platform, some of the important features and tools you should look for are:
- Real-time tracking and reporting
- Automated policy enforcement
- Mobile access for the employee
- Custom approval workflows
- Insights and data analytics
- HRMS, accounting tools, and payroll integration
Step 4: Set Up the Approval Workflows
Once you choose the platform, the next is to set up the role-based approval workflows to avoid any confusion and delays.
It includes a clear approval hierarchy like who is approving the departmental expenses, the limit for auto-approval, or what categories the HR team will be requiring, etc.
Step 5: Train Your Employees & Managers
To ensure the system works to its fullest, ensure your team has the proper training beforehand.
- It includes consulting sessions and guides on how they can submit claims, understand the reimbursement, check status, or handle situations if they escalate.
- You can also use a chatbot or dedicated manager to handle the support channels.
- When you launch the new system, also ensure you have done pilot testing to understand how it will work.
- As you process, use the insights to refine and monitor your real time expense tracking system.
Conclusion
Real-time expense tracking ensures a finance upgrade but also provides better money management, accountability and boosts employee trust.
The technology enables the HR team to make smart decisions, budgeting, and better enforcement regardless of the workforce models.
At the intersection of people management and automation, we at HROne provide the HR software and tools to simplify your expense process while aligning with organizational goals. Try HROne for Free.