Master spend controls and gain financial visibility across teams

If your CEO, a potential investor, or a board member came to you today and asked you to break down the organization’s spending for the last year, could you do it? If the answer is no, you’re not alone. Nearly two-thirds of CFOs surveyed say they don’t have total visibility into the transactions of their organization.

It’s not surprising either. Traditional finance systems are fragmented and heavily manual; it’s nearly impossible to get an accurate picture of an organization’s spending. Why? Because the record-keeping burden falls disproportionately on employees. 

Finance staff can lay the groundwork by creating an expense policy, setting up coding infrastructure in expense reports, and training employees on how to comply and work within the system. But that’s really a fraction of the work. 

Employees and finance teams are frustrated

Employees are already frustrated by expense processes and policies. According to one report, one-third of employees in the report said that organizing receipts is their top frustration, almost half said they have a hard time understanding approval policies, and nearly two-thirds admitted to losing receipts. With all that manual work placed on employees, it’s no wonder that finance staff are constantly chasing down receipts, expense codes, and transaction details.

CFOs and finance teams are just as aggravated as their employee counterparts. In a 2022 CFO survey by DataRails, 80% of CFOs said they have “the most manual labor-intensive role on a day-to-day basis compared to other C-level executives.” Almost half of responding CFOs reported that “regular identification and correction of errors represents the biggest manual challenge.” That manual workload for employees translates to even more manual work for their counterparts on the finance team.

And these complaints have much broader consequences than uncontrolled spending and lack of visibility. Manual work for both employees and finance staff add up to high error rates in financial data. They make it incredibly difficult to scale the financial processes of a growing company, comply with audits where necessary, and cause poorly-informed decision-making due to unreliable data.  

Those uninformed financial decisions can result in overspending, missed savings opportunities, and slower response times in fast-moving industries. All these events can have long-term consequences. Overspending and missed savings opportunities can contribute to a company’s poor financial position over time, making it unattractive to potential investors and prospective employees. And slower response times in fast-moving industries can cost the company larger, more strategic customers that would help fuel growth.

Spend controls: a multi-part solution to a complex problem 

Companies need to transfer the burden of expense management work from employees to technology. Employees need to be able to do their jobs, regardless of where they are, and not have to think about how they are or aren’t allowed to spend corporate funds. They need to rely on automated guardrails – not their memory – to keep them in check.

Finance teams need a way to leverage technology to automate their expense policy and reporting processes as well. They need to be able to tell a smart system – once – that client dinners are a maximum of $100 and fall under the client entertainment category, for example. Or program in a list of approved merchants for specific purchases. And they need a high-level view of spending that they can filter per department, per spending category, or comparing year-over-year. 

With PEX’s expense management platform, finance teams can leverage AI and automation to take the onus off individual team members and lay it right where it belongs – on systems that can support its weight. 

AI-enabled and automated data capture can save massive amounts of time, with 25% of PEX customers saving 10+ months per month, according to a 2023 PEX customer survey. In addition, automated spend controls prevent unapproved transactions from occurring, saving money for 60% of PEX customers. One customer even reported that PEX slashed their time chasing receipts by 95%.

Here’s what Sarah C., Director of Administration, had to say about PEX spending controls on G2:

“PEX makes it easy to put funds in employees’ hands when and where they’re needed yet still limit amounts and the types of expenses that can be spent….all from my desk.”

What are automated employee spend controls?

What are employee spend controls?

Employee spend controls are a set of rules and regulations organizations create to set boundaries around employee spending. Instead of just resorting to an expense policy on paper, employee spend controls are digitized so they can be enforced in real time. For example, an employee’s PEX Visa® Prepaid Card or PEX Visa® Commercial Card can be set to only allow them to spend $100 per day on travel, rather than the employee having to keep track of purchases to know how much they’ve spent.  

PEX’s robust spend controls empower administrators to build an expense framework that removes the mental energy of employee spending, protects the company’s assets, and gives peace of mind to both finance staff and employees.

• PEX’s advanced approval policies make it easy to create a variety of workflows for expense approval, configure rules per entity (department, purchase type, tag), levels of approval, and even auto-approval. 
• Custom spend rules enable admins to create unlimited rules to manage spending, including restrictions (by merchant type, physical location, day of the week), cardholder groups with role-based spending restrictions, and declined purchases outside spending rules.
• PEX’s user management function enables administrators to add new team members and administrators in different departments of the company in real time, which may have various levels and categories of spend.
• Auto enforcer automatically suspends corporate card usage until an employee submits their receipts. Administrators can even enforce tagging GL codes or adding notes. Employees are reminded to submit their receipts right after they swipe their card. They can submit via text, email, the mobile app or desktop before they forget. Once the proper documentation is added, the employee’s card is automatically unblocked. 

AI-enabled and automated oversight into spend

PEX’s automated and AI-powered expense management functions can shift the tedious, manual work of filing, processing, and approving expense reports to streamlined processes that run on autopilot. 

• AutoTagger enables admin users to automatically apply GL codes to transaction records. Admins can program GL codes up front, telling the system once which GL codes go with which types of transactions. 
• AI-based receipt matching automatically matches data from card transactions to corresponding data on employee receipts. It looks at the amount on the card transaction from your bank and connects it to the line item on the receipt submitted by the employee. 

Centralized visibility across projects and platforms

PEX’s platform empowers organizations to build a centralized command center of expense management data, and continuously sync that data with other mission-critical systems. Administrators can be confident they are viewing an accurate, complete dataset.

• PEX’s reporting capabilities enable admins to run reports based on spend by card, category, group, transaction, settlement detail, authorization detail, cardholder funding, and cardholder balance. Finance teams can sort and filter data to gain various insights, with the confidence that they are seeing a 360-degree view. 
• PEX integrations make it easy for finance leaders to centralize transaction data by syncing PEX transactions to key ERP systems like Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, NetSuite, and CMiC. Through the PEX Integration Marketplace, GL codes and transaction details flow directly from PEX to the appropriate ERP, where admins can see exactly where funds are going and intervene if necessary, how spend is allocated across project milestones, and whether spend is tracking over or under budget versus the original estimate.

Finance teams need AI and automation to survive

Employees and finance teams that use traditional expense management processes are extremely frustrated with the manual effort it takes to get their work done. Employees are on the hook for remembering spending policies, keeping track of receipts, and manually recording transaction details.

Finance teams have the tedious task of following up on any missing or incorrect expenses. As for getting visibility into company spend – it’s virtually impossible given the fragmented systems finance teams use, coupled with delayed and sometimes incorrect expense data.

Organizations need to transfer that manual work from individuals to systems. PEX’s expense management platform enables finance teams to:

• Automate spend controls using a wide variety of configurations – by employee, department, type of purchase, location, day of the week, cardholder group, etc.
• Automate data capture by leveraging AI to ingest receipt data and automation to tag transactions with spending codes.
• Centralize data visibility by integrating expense data with ERPs and offering robust reporting options for data viewing. 

By leveraging the PEX platform, employees can spend with confidence, knowing they are adhering to expense policies, and that transactions are accounted for and categorized appropriately. CFOs can set spending rules and GL codes once, and let the platform do the rest of the work – while they gain 360-degree access to financial data for decision-making purposes.

Want to learn how to save time and money using the PEX platform? Contact us to schedule a customized demo today.