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Reengineer Workflow Expense Management with Automated Reporting

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At PEX, we are obsessed with how our customers manage workforce spending. Incomplete audit trails, lost receipts, expense report headaches, lost time and money —we hear about it all the time. It makes sense, since we are in the business of improving financial operations and expense management.

We believe that the traditional expense reporting approach is obsolete, a legacy of an old process and outdated solutions.

In this post, we explore the role expense reports play and how businesses can replace them with a process that approves spending in advance and allocates transactions to appropriate budgets in real time.

Expense reports: The good, the bad and the ugly

Not too many people come to work in the morning and tell you how much they look forward to expense reports. But given the way most businesses operate, they are a necessary evil.

Along with a much-needed paper trail, they tell the IRS that employee reimbursements (if any) are for legitimate business expenses, not subject to income taxes. Mistakes, missing receipts, incorrect accounting codes and out-of-policy spending—they are just part of the process.

But the traditional process ignores a simple reality – there is no need for expense reports when transactions are approved in advance and allocated to the appropriate budgets automatically.

It’s time you stopped putting the cart before the horse.

Managing workforce spending is frustrating because the expense management process has it backwards. Even if you give employees guidelines or specific instructions, the mechanism is reactive. That is, you cannot actually approve or reject a business expense until after the money is spent.

Yes, you want your workers to have the flexibility to make purchases when they need to. But traditional expense management only pushes the snags and headaches to the back end, when the expenses may be harder to rationalize. You may even have gone over budget.

Replace expense management with proactive workforce spend management.

You can enjoy greater efficiencies with a new approach to managing business expenses. The new, next-generation spend management platforms use advanced technology to enable greater flexibility, while limiting employee spending to approved business expenses.

Here’s how PEX, the leading workforce spend management platform, works.

The PEX Platform puts a powerful software layer between a business bank account and prepaid cards that you distribute to your workforce. You use a website or mobile app to turn cards on and off at will and preprogram them to only work for approved merchant categories, times of day and budgets.

Get proactive with employee expenses.

PEX is incredibly flexible and surprisingly easy to administer. In fact, “easy,” is the thing we hear most from our customers. You can use built-in settings or set up your own groups, each with its own set of spending rules. You assign spending privileges with one click. In the event of an unforeseen need, you override rules in real-time. All through the same mobile app or website.

The PEX Platform lets you give cards to your workforce, even volunteers and contractors, with no credit checks. This is not a credit card, the cards have no value until you want them to be used. You and your administrators can leave them on or off, keep minimums on them or leave them blank until needed, and even restrict them to specific purchases and needs.

This flexibility eliminates the need for petty cash or check reimbursement.

Make expense reports a thing of the past!

With PEX, there’s no need for the traditional expense report because every business expense is approved in advance and allocated to the appropriate budget in real time.

As soon as an employee runs a PEX Card, the transaction becomes visible on the PEX Platform. The employee submits a photograph of the receipt, adds a note and identifies the account by choosing “tags” from a dropdown menu on the mobile app. These tags have plain English names of your choosing; they map to the codes in your accounting software.

In other words, PEX lets you automate reconciliation. There’s no reason to have separate systems for corporate credit cards or corporate expense cards, receipts, and expense tracking. PEX combines them all into one simple app.

Reporting a purchase takes seconds and the transaction details reach Finance in real-time, already allocated to the approved budget. PEX integrates with accounting systems, so it only takes a few clicks to get the approved purchase into your books and ledgers.

Automate every administrative step.

PEX also offers APIs to completely automate this process. Your organization can issue instructions, load cards and even approve purchases in real-time, driven entirely by your operational flow.

Because everything happens in real-time, and virtually all card operations are live through the API, you can run a more flexible and nimble business…

Even as you control and track how every penny is spent.

Click here for a free PEX demo.

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