What is expense management?

Every business incurs a variety of expenses - from procurement to employee travel - as the cost of doing business. The policies and procedures surrounding money spend on the company expenses - from purchase to reimbursement - are a cog in the expense management machine. For example, company policies manage how and how much money is spent, such as price limits for travel or meals. Expense procedures define how the cash flow is handled regarding spend and reimbursements, while keeping policies in check, including purchase orders, pre-approvals, and expense reimbursement.

Expense management also includes any services, documents, or technologies that are used to process and track the spend - be it manually, local software, or web-based applications, such as Webexpenses online expense software.

Before software to manage expenses

Expense management used to involve a blizzard of excel sheets, paperwork and plenty of man-hours by finance personnel. Even after this cumbersome approach, expenses might still be inaccurate, out of date, and costing the business extra in processing costs. Does any of this sound familiar:

• Travel and Entertainment (T&E) costs increasingly harder to control and monitor
• Expense processing costs are increasing
• Financial figures not adding up
• Struggling to implement policy and legislation amongst claimants