rolex
SSupported by cloud hosting provider DigitalOcean – Try DigitalOcean now and receive a $200 when you create a new account!

ExpenseWatch – Automate Your Expense Reports And Spend With Confidence

Listen to this article

ExpenseWatch develops tools that enable organizations to manage company spending and to automate time consumer paper-based processes for expense reporting, purchasing and payable invoices (bills). Simply ExpenseWatch helps you gain better control over how your company manages spending. Below is our interview with Bill Vergantino, President and CEO of ExpenseWatch:

Bill VergantinoQ: Bill tell us something more about ExpenseWatch and your services?

A: Our objective is to empower our customers to spend with confidence through the knowledge that their spending processes are as efficient as possible, while providing the visibility to spending needed and the policy enforcement required. We know that when we do our job well; our customers can stay focused on what they do well.

For these organizations, we offer products that provide automation, visibility and control for one or more spending process, including:

  • Expense Reporting
  • Purchasing
  • Payable Invoices
  • Complete Spend Management

Our offerings can be used as a standalone solution to optimize a specific spend process in an organization, or together as a complete spend management suite for all spending.

In any given organization, people perform different roles in facilitating spending. Each role can benefit from an automated spend management system in the following ways:

  • Empower Submitters to quickly create and submit spend transactions with documentation
  • Empower Approvers to effectively make informed approval decisions
  • Empower Accounting to efficiently facilitate payment of spend obligations
  • Empower Executives to analyze spending and trust that policy is being enforced
  • Empower Administrators to flexibly configure and manage the solution to suit their business

The benefits our customers receive can be significant. Cost savings is one area: According to Paystream Advisor’s in its 2015 Travel and Expense Management Report, it states that the average cost of manually processing expense reports is $26.60, vs. the average cost of $ 17.31 when some degree of automation is used and $6.85 for a fully automated expense management system. Costs for processing invoices and purchase requisitions/purchase orders are similar.

Time savings is another huge benefit. Many of our customers say that ExpenseWatch enables them to shave days or weeks off of approval and reimbursement times, in some cases going from weeks to hours.

Another benefit is the ability to empower approvers and accounting to be able to manage many more transactions than a manual system – many customers have said ExpenseWatch has made it possible for the team to do more without having to hire additional staff.

Q: You’ve recently announced the new ExpenseWatch Mobile App. What are main improvements?

A: ExpenseWatch Mobile App is completely new, built from the ground up. Users will use the new app for three primary reasons:

  • Rapid Fire Receipt Capture – You can quickly capture receipt images and upload them into the ExpenseWatch system to use when building your reports using either the online system or the mobile app.
  • Create, View, Edit and Route Expense Reports – Multiple options make it easy to build your report, including integrated credit card feeds and assigned travel itineraries.
  • Approve Spending Transactions – You have all the tools you need to approve all spending transactions, including expense reports, purchase requisitions and payable invoices.

The mobile app is an extension of the online system and does require an active subscription. It operates on iPhones and Android devices. Organizations can give ExpenseWatch a try by signing up for a free 14-day trial, which gives them the opportunity to try both the online system and the mobile app.

Ben, Expense atch's Spend Guru

Ben, ExpenseWatch’s Spend Guru is seen here waiting for the Staten Island ferry to visit a client’s New York City office to help them Spend with Confidence.

Q: What are main benefits of using ExpenseWatch Expense Reports?

A: Automating the expense reporting process saves companies both time and money.

For companies, it’s gaining the visibility into spending that isn’t possible in a manual system, as well as ensuring that the controls they want are in place and being followed. For the individuals involved in the expense reporting process, it simply makes their jobs a lot easier by empowering them with the tools to effectively perform their roles.

With an automated system, everything is streamlined:

  • Expense Report Submitters more easily build expense reports, and have visual cues to ensure they include all of the company-required information, plus they can see right away if a spending request is in policy.
  • Approvers can easily see all supporting documentation and whether items are within company spending policies.
  • Accounting and the finance team can see that all approvers have reviewed the spending request and can quickly make any last minute adjustments before scheduling for payment/reimbursement.
  • Executives can see all spending, what’s been approved as well as what is waiting in the pipeline to be approved or paid. This visibility enables them to take action on spend that is in process should the situation dictate.

Here’s a rundown of how our spend management system works:

When a customer signs on with ExpenseWatch, we assign a dedicated Customer Satisfaction Engineer who works with the organization to configure the system to align to their organization and we will train all users. In most instances it takes about three web meetings scheduled over the course of 30-60 calendar days to come fully onboard.

Organizations will have different roles within the company, with each role being given permissions to access the relevant parts of the system to accomplish their tasks.

Submitters will easily create expense reports, purchase requests and invoices to route for approvals. For expense reports, submitters can build reports using a mobile app or the online system. Integrated credit card feeds and booked travel itineraries can be dropped onto expense reports filling in much of the data submitters have to fill in. Receipts are easily attached.

Approvers have all of the information they need to make informed, intelligent approvals. Our new Empowered Approvals enables them to uniquely configure their inbox views with the information they need most, in the order they want to see it to support approval decisions. For example, approvers may want to see only those transactions that are out of policy, or may want to add a column to view specific expense submitters’ reports, or sort columns by high dollar reports, and more.

The system can be set up with approval workflows that are as simple or sophisticated as needed.

Once everything has navigated through the approval workflow, the finance teams takes one final review to ensure everything is coded correctly, and then creates an invoice that has been approved for payment. This can either be paid from within ExpenseWatch using an ACH provider, or passed through to the selected payment/reimbursement solution, such as an accounting system, payroll provider or other payment system.

At any time, real-time reports can be generated to provide managers, executives and the finance teams with visibility into spending, no matter where it is in the approval process.

Q: What can we expect from ExpenseWatch in next six months? What are your plans?

A: We will continue to add additional features into the Mobile and online apps, such as the ability to scan in receipts and have the data from the receipt populate the line items, additional approval functionality, and tighter integrations with various accounting and other business systems, to name a few.

Q: How would you convince the reader to start using ExpenseWatch?

A: It’s exciting to watch your company grow – you add more employees, customers, products and more. But as you grow, you may find processes can become strained and cause bottlenecks and challenges that can slow the business down. Spending processes are a perfect example.

As organizations grow, how they manage spending processes is often one of the last areas to be streamlined and automated. More people spend money on behalf of the organization and the accounting team is buried under piles of paper and can’t keep up and approving managers don’t have the visibility they need to approve spending. It’s when employees become frustrated by not being able to do their jobs efficiently and effectively, companies begin to realize they need to make a change. Also, when management can’t get the visibility it needs into spending, or can’t keep tabs on who is spending what with whom, they want to make changes.

We find many of our new customers are making the switch from paper-based systems to manage company expense reporting, purchasing and payable invoices (bills). The increasing costs to process spending requests, in both time and money, are also often catalysts for companies to look to make changes in how they manage company spending.

Although our customers automate their spending processes initially driven by the need for efficiency, visibility or control, they quickly begin to see the benefits from the other factors coming into play as well. What’s more, they create a business culture that promotes spending control by empowering employees throughout their organizations to take responsibility for how company money is spent.

Activate Social Media:
Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedin
,
Mercedes-Benz-EQS