Let’s Get Visible! How Financial Visibility is Key

By EmmaAugust 18, 2017
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–This article was last updated on 5 October 2021-

Company finance can be a complex issue. When it comes to trying to make some savings and reign in the budget, even knowing where to start can be an overwhelming task. Often you will discover, that once you have found an area to look at more closely, accurate figures and useful reports are hard to come by. Improving your company’s financial visibility is the key to getting the detail you need and provide clarity to your spending. So how can you improve your company’s visibility?

Hand holding a laptop presenting a financial graph for financial visibility.

Capture Spend Easily

In order to get the data that you need to make better financial decisions, you need to start from the beginning. This means that you need an easy and intuitive way for your employees to capture their receipts and expenses as they incur them. The easier you make this for your employees, the more readily this will be adopted from the get go. Capturing spend as it happens means that you can see in real-time how cash flow is being manipulated. Trying to analyse data that is across disparate spreadsheets is time-consuming and can make cross-collaboration between different departments and projects very difficult.

Your finance team should not have to retrospectively analyse spend, but should be able to take more productive and proactive measurements to gain better insights. Often, when it comes to putting data into spreadsheets, important information is not included and you are unable to effectively interpret any useful spending patterns. Your employees need access to a cloud-based system that allows them to capture and track their expenses anywhere. If your users are on the go with just a mobile in hand, then make sure that they are equipped with a mobile app that allows them to store their receipts digitally and save on a pile of receipts stacking up.

Access to Insightful Reports

Having an accessible system where all your companies’ spend data is stored in one place means that you can easily run spending reports to spot any trends. This is where automated expense solutions are bridging the gap between spend and visibility. Finance teams are able to drill down into where money is being spent. With an expense management solution like ExpenseIn, you are to create custom reports that provide you with a greater insight into departmental spending, project expenditure and much more. This can be a great indicator as to where savings can be made and could even be a starting point for negotiating better deals with your suppliers.

Visibility Over the Whole Process

Having the ability to create insightful reports is only one area of the jigsaw in gaining better visibility. You also need a transparent system that allows you to track and pinpoint your business expenses anywhere in the process. Being able to have an overview of the approval system is also key. Seeing who still needs to approve an expense can save a lot of time asking around. A similar view of policy issues can provide a useful insight too. Seeing where multiple employees are having issues can be a good place to start a review of your policies. With an automated solution you can also adapt your policies instantly to reflect any overspends in certain areas. Is a particular department spending too much money in one area? If so, you can then adjust the policy assigned to them to balance out any overspending.

If you are not employing an automated solution that tracks the expense process from start to finish then you will struggle to gain a full picture of your company expenses. Visibility over every part of the expense journey will ensure that you can always analyse your company spending when you need it the most.