3 Reasons Why You Can Bring Down Your Accounting Costs with SaaS
For any business, ensuring you’re HMRC compliant is vitally important. Whether you’re operating as a sole trader, a partnership or a limited company, it’s essential that you’re aware of your tax liabilities and your reporting requirements. With heavy sanctions for non-compliance, however, many companies are investing significant resources in managing their business administration.
Verifying and recording business expenses can be time-consuming and companies often hire in-house personnel to deal with this aspect of financing. Whilst this may be viable for larger companies, it’s often unnecessary and increases expenditure considerably.
With SaaS providing an effective alternative, businesses of all sizes can benefit from using expense management software. Using an expense application not only streamlines the process of managing employee expenditure, it also reduces the need for dedicated in-house expense departments, thus enabling the company to reduce costs significantly.
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1) Using mobile technology to handle business expenses
Traditionally, employees were required to hand in paper receipts when they had purchased something which qualified as a business expense. Whilst this was somewhat effective, it required a considerable amount of administration and proved costly to businesses.
Mobile technology, however, enables employees to scan receipt information into a dedicated app. With the relevant information automatically extracted, the salient information is then captured and uploaded within seconds.
With employees able to upload company expenses quickly, it ensures that expenses aren’t overlooked and that employees don’t attempt to record their expenses at once, at the end of the year. In fact, cloud technology facilitates real-time reporting and ensures that managers are able to keep track of company expenditure.
2) Implementing in-house expense policies
When employees are permitted to claim back company expenses, it’s vital that a clear policy is in place. Employees should be aware of what constitutes a valid expense. Additionally, limits may be put in place so that company expenses are not extortionate and company funds are not wasted.
Even the most comprehensive policies can lead to confusion, however, and it’s important that management are able to respond quickly to avoid unnecessary expenditure. Using real-time reporting via an expense application allows for regular monitoring.
If employees are applying the expense policy incorrectly or are unaware of specific regulations, this can be addressed before company funds are wasted or misapplied. Furthermore, dedicated expense management software allows supervisors to approve or deny an expense request once it’s been made by an employee.
With companies able to monitor business expenses more carefully, expense applications ensure that instances of intentional or accidental over-expenditure are reduced and that expense policy enforcement is transparent at all times.
3) Transporting your accounts
Whether you have an in-house accounting department or use outsourced accountancy services, it’s easy to transport your expense figures to the relevant staff members. By collating expenses and recording every instance of employee expenditure, finance staff are able to determine exactly where company funds are going.
As a result, future business decisions can be made with this in mind. As business owners and operators are able to identify existing expenditure, company processes and in-house policies can be regularly reviewed to reduce future costs and, therefore, increase company profits.
