The Benefits of Real-time Expense Reporting & Analytics!

Expense reporting and analytics offer insights into spending patterns, trends, and data. This can provide a competitive edge to companies by enabling informed decision-making. In this article, we explore how businesses can make the most of advanced analytics to control their business travel expenditure and control overspending:

Expense reports can take ages to create; if done manually, it's too easy to make mistakes. Real-time expense reporting and analytics can be the building blocks to the success of many projects. In fact, the absence of expense reporting could lead to endless questions about missing details and a loss of trust with stakeholders. 

Employing a real-time expense reporting and analytics solution makes creating, sharing and accessing expense data a breeze. With its help, it's easier to say goodbye to hours of manual work and broken processes.

Understanding Real-time Expense Reporting and Analytics

It's hard for a growing business to keep up with different kinds of updates — especially regarding more fundamental elements, such as supply, demand and pricing strategies. Real-time expense reporting helps in recording transactions instantly.

Since business travel can be a major expense, real-time expense reporting can be instrumental in recording travel and other official purposes-related expenses as soon as they happen. 

A powerful business travel management platform can offer regular insights into business travel expenses and ensure that this data can be accessed by simply clicking a button.

So, let's dig deeper into this subject and try to understand the benefits of using a platform that supports real-time expense reporting and analytics.

a) Get Insights Anytime, Anywhere

With a real-time expense reporting solution, you can get a trackable history of all your transactions with just a few taps on the mobile screen or clicks on a laptop. Real-time expense reporting technology instantly provides payer data, so you can track every rupee you spend. With its help, an employee can capture trip spending, including conveyance, food, phone bills and other miscellaneous expenses. These expenses are over and above the booking transactions already made on a business travel management software.

b) Rely on Accurate Bookkeeping

A reliable and accurate bookkeeping platform can be a game-changer for your business. Ultimately, bookkeeping is a system for tracking and reporting expenses. Every company has employees and operations to manage. Yet, it is difficult to keep track of everything – from employee time off to invoices paid and invoices received. 

With automatic bookkeeping, a business travel management platform helps you manage these details in real time. Furthermore, it can help during audits and tax-related exercises. This is because all data has been stored and maintained along with relevant proofs like bills and receipts.

c) Create Data-backed Strategy

A data-backed strategy is an excellent way to reduce the time it takes to prepare expense reports. For instance, once you start recording all expenses, you'll notice areas with unnecessary spending and areas struggling because of budget constraints. With access to real-time data, you can change your company policy and assign a travel budget where it's most needed. 

When your expenses are reported as they happen, you can create a data-backed approach that quickly and effectively expands your organisation's revenue management strategy. A real-time expense reporting tool helps small businesses automate workflows, streamline operations, and increase efficiency.

d) Offer Quick Reimbursements

A real-time expense management tool eliminates manual work to make sure that there are no reimbursement delays. Moreover, it ensures that there are no errors or duplicate entries. With the help of such a tool, employers can directly transfer the money to the employees' accounts as per their needs without waiting for physical evidence. Employees only need to upload an e-copy of receipts, bills, and other expense-related documents to get reimbursements. 

e) Detect Fraud and Errors

Your company may be spending time and money on reports that could have errors and fraudulent entries. This often leads to:

1. Increased operating expenses due to costly internal controls and more staff training.

By relying on manual calculations, your employees are spending unnecessary time on tasks that can be automated with ease. A real-time expense reporting application can calculate all expenses via e-copies of bills and receipts. This saves you from hiring multiple people to tally and record expenses. Furthermore, it can help you avoid miscalculations and see a clear regular spending pattern.

2. Delays in reimbursement due to recalculation of expenses.

When used for business travel, real-time expense reporting and analytics can help companies save time and money. All expenses are accurately uploaded, and there is no need for recalculations to check for errors. With instant reports, organisations can gauge the amount of money they're spending along different parameters, including hotels, flights, transportation, food, and more. Analytics reports can help them cut down on unnecessary expenses and make improvements wherever necessary.

3. Probable increase in employee dissatisfaction.

Manual expense management can frustrate employees as they claim and wait for reimbursements.

Real-time expense reporting can also help in making reimbursements quicker and seamless. This is because all expenses, including those made on the booking platform and those incurred during a business trip, get recorded in real-time. This makes it easier for managers to check and approve all expenses to reimburse employees without unnecessary delays. Employing a corporate credit card can also speed things up.

Make the Transition Easier

Manual work is time-consuming and can lead to unnecessary mistakes. A real-time expense reporting and analytics tool can help you manage expenses, provide quick reimbursements, get insights, and create data-backed strategies. 

To switch from this exasperating process of traditional bookkeeping to real-time expense reporting, your company needs an expense tracking and reporting tool.

myBiz, powered by MakeMyTrip, is a one-stop solution for all your business travel-related expenses. It comes with an expense management and booking dashboard that keeps easy track of spending during business travel for easy reconciliation of finances and for making error-free reimbursements. 

As a travel management platform, it provides cheaper booking suggestions and instantly downloadable reports. It also gives companies the following:

• T&E form downloads with attached receipts
• Automated expense and invoice capturing
• Expense tracking
• Instant expense claim reports for record maintenance and auditing purposes. 

In fact, myBiz is the ideal platform designed for addressing business travel-related needs and tracking expense data. So, make your company’s corporate travel planning and management easier with myBiz today!

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) 

Q1. What does expense management mean?

Ans. Expense management refers to the systems put in place to process, pay, and audit employee expenses, including business travel expenses.

Q2. What is the process of expense reporting?

Ans. The expense reporting process includes submitting expense reports with attached bills for reimbursement. Once approved and checked for compliance, employees get reimbursements for the expenses made out of pocket.

Q3. What is reporting and analytics?

Ans. Reporting means collecting data and organising it in a structured manner. Conversely, analytics helps to identify trends and patterns to facilitate decision-making.

Q4. What is expense analytics?

Ans. With expense analytics, businesses can compare their travel spending against the allocated budget. This enables them to analyse areas of improvement and stop overspending.