Why managing expenses is killing your entire team’s productivity

Expense management is fundamentally broken

Surprisingly, there's a lot of common ground between finance teams and sales or marketing teams when it comes to managing expenses - both agree that the process is fractured. Existing expense management processes are excruciating for everyone involved, and manual expense entry is responsible for stealing thousands of hours each year - time that should be used to deliver growth, lead teams, and onboard new accounts.

The entire expense management process is backwards, with finance teams becoming support staff for other departments and key sales leaders trapped at their desks for days. Eventually, the entire team ends up completing tasks that don’t align with the unique skill set they were hired to deliver - killing productivity fast.

The worst part: the entire process has minimal impact on the misuse of corporate funds, and the return on investment for this lost productivity across the whole organisation is negligible.

Extensive delays between the time that expenses are incurred and the date of reconciliation render most data useless. If finance teams notice issues with an expense, many months have passed, and corporate cards or invoices have already been paid.

Time to say goodbye to the buy now, expense later culture

For decades, the culture of buy now and expense later has become ingrained in companies across the globe. Ad-hoc verbal or email purchase approvals abound due to slow, poorly designed expense systems. Managers with the best intentions unofficially approve purchases on-the-fly to allow team members to access the items they need. The issues begin when card statements arrive and expenses are reconciled against expense policies. Unavoidable delays associated with existing physical corporate cards continue to cost organisations millions of dollars each year. Approximately 10% of employee expenses fall outside of company expense policies, yet only 1% of these transactions are rejected. Finance teams have exceptionally poor visibility of spending, and intervention is only possible weeks or months after spending occurs. Additionally, the information available about each transaction is often minimal, and spending category data is often dependent on employees entering data correctly.

Virtual corporate cards are saving businesses thousands

Australian startup Weel is changing the way that expenses are managed by delivering unprecedented control to finance teams and managers before expenses are incurred. The misuse of company funds for personal gain is still one of the biggest issues businesses and not-for-profit organisations face. Lack of policies or vague expense guidelines are often blamed for misuse. However, the reality is that existing physical corporate cards lack the flexibility to support businesses’ fast paced expense needs.

Weel's industry-leading virtual corporate card platform provides finance teams with real-time visibility of purchases. Rich transactional data is available as soon as payments occur and can be automatically exported to an organisation’s accounting software. Spending that falls outside of standard patterns can be flagged immediately, and trends can quickly be identified to assist with planning future purchases.

Faster reconciliation saves thousands of hours and allows team members to get back to performing their unique role and delivering growth.

Here’s how virtual corporate cards are changing everything

1. Finance teams or managers create a virtual corporate card in seconds with any budget. Funds are restricted to specific categories or merchants, ensuring that spending aligns with the intended purpose and eliminating potential misuse.
2. Once created, virtual corporate cards are sent to team members to install on their smartphone instantly - ready for immediate use.
3. When a purchase occurs, team members quickly reconcile the transaction on their smartphone in the field.
4. Finance teams have complete visibility of transactional data as expenses are incurred, allowing early intervention if necessary.
5. Expense data is automatically exported to existing accounting software saving finance teams thousands of hours every month.

Built from the ground up to support not-for-profits

Weel was designed from inception to support not-for-profit and charitable organisations’ specific needs, delivering high levels of visibility, full accountability, and fast access to funds. Now more than ever not-for-profit organisations must ensure that their funds are being used for the purpose intended. For example, the Royal Commission into aged care’s recent findings have shown a light onto spending and misuse of funds across the sector. Weel's virtual corporate card platform allows not-for-profit organisations the flexibility to quickly distribute funds without relinquishing any control. Additionally, workers across the not-for-profit sector can now spend more time improving their clients lives rather than completing hours of paperwork.

More care, full compliance, and instant funds distribution for not-for-profit and charitable organisations.