5 Benefits Of Expense Software For Professional Service Firms

Handling a professional service firm with just human resources is impossible. Technology is already solving a lot of time and resource management challenges which is the core of a service-providing firm. 

Many small and big professional service firms have a lot of transactions daily, due to their customer-centric nature of business. Therefore, you cannot waste human resources on redundant activities like tracking and managing expenses of employees, and other business expenses like travel, technology purchase, onboarding, etc. Another aspect of expense management is to monitor employee time investment and external expenses apart from other operational/project costs. 

The expectations and demands of your consultants are pushing admin tasks like expense management on excel spreadsheets at the last on the priority list. This will impact immensely on the bottom line of your firm. To tackle this, expense software has become a common thing amongst professionals. It resolves the manual filling of timesheets and saves other business costs like expense processing costs, investment costs, budget mismatch, etc. 

The best expense management software provides professional service firms with a package of benefits, which improves productivity manifolds.

1. Monitoring Project Resources Effectively

You must always be updated on the resources you have deployed on your projects. And accurate and timely information on costing provides the precise data to make better, and more productive business decisions.

With the expense management software, you can easily monitor your labour and other expenses as a fully-integrated solution. It allows you to include out-of-pocket expenses too in the project profitability calculations, which are regularly updated with every new entry into the system. 

The major benefit here is its intuitive user interface that can be accessed from any device, at any location. As a professional service firm, you want your clients and employees to monitor the resource use which is easy to track with the expense software’s user-friendly dashboard.

2. Effective Timesheets Management

The entry of time and expenses gets simplified with the expense software, which is available for desktops, mobile, tablets, or laptops to meet your employee’s comfort. 

It provides a single-platform integration of entries from every employee irrespective of their location or time of entry. This streamlines the collection of labour and expense data into timesheets and expense reports, making it easily available for the project manager’s approval. 

You can also integrate your calendar with your project’s module within the ERP system, which makes it easy to make entries and push for approval. Though, the dashboard of the expense software provides constant visibility of the timesheet status – to be created, submitted for approval, or approved. It also reminds the respective consultants who haven’t submitted their entries on time. 

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3. Real-time Insights and Data Analytics

Firms delivering professional services need to monitor their finances too to scale and grow their business to new heights. With automated expense data recording and management, expense reporting becomes prudent for effective data analytics. 

Various key performance indicators (KPIs) like sales metrics, employee performance, departmental expenditure, savings, refunds, etc. allow firms to easily induce into their data analytics reports with real-time data insights. The expense software provides an intuitive reporting feature on the dashboard, which provides updated finance numbers before the expense lifecycle completes. This way the budgeting and forecasting become precise leading to strategic business decisions and achieving optimum inventory goals.

4. Multi-platform Integration

The work of the expense software isn’t just to record and report the expense data accurately. It goes further with integrating the software data to other important platforms such as accounting software, receipt scanning platform, etc. This way you can easily export or share the data inter-platform without the trouble of file format compatibility as it supports them all. 

Also, it supports device compatibility like mobile devices, laptops, or any other screen device supported by android, apple, or any other operating system. This allows customer acquisition easily without the issue of devices they operate with. 

With the expense management software, you don’t need to buy other platform services separately every time, expense management software with receipt scanning feature can save a lot of business costs, and ease up the operations of the business.

5. Employee-friendly Benefits

The major benefit for a professional service firm with expense software is access to data from any place and at any time. The cloud-based expense software makes it easy for firms to manage expense decisions on the go on business trips, work from home etc. 

If you’re worried about the security then that’s not the issue even. It provides various security options like two-layer protection, time-bound access, changing passwords every month, etc., which provides employee transparency along with the security of data. 

Final Thoughts

Expense management has become easy for even professional service firms with the help of expensive software technology. It allows for an automated expense management system, effective timesheet tracking, real-time insights and reporting, and other employee-friendly benefits. You can’t miss switching to expense software as a solution to your expense management chaos.