When you think about working capital management or spend management platform, you think of managing expenses incurred in your business over a quarter of a year. But in reality, spend management is much more than just expense accounting.
You need to understand what working capital management is, what the benefits of a spend management platform are, and how to monitor working capital in financial management. Also, you should be aware, of the importance of working capital management
Spend management is an umbrella term for the end-to-end management of company-wide spending. It encompasses spending analysis, spending categorization, spending strategy, and spending reporting. Everything that goes behind generates a bottom line for the business.
Differences Between Expense Management and Spend Management Platform
There’s a wide difference between spend management and expense management.
While we understood what spend management is, expense management is a subset of spend management. Expense management only deals with department-wise spending and expenses borne on company cards and accounts.
What Is Working Capital Management And How To Strategize It?
If you are looking for a comprehensive solution for budgetary reasons, you should look closely at devising a spend management plan for your company by using EnKash working capital management software.
Spend management is a step-by-step process.
- It starts with a spend analysis of your corporate expenses.
- To come up with a plan to better your finances, you first need to figure out where the money is present in the pipeline.
- You can start by making a list of all your corporate expenses like your SaaS purchases, vendor payments, ad-hoc purchases, payroll, reimbursements, travel & entertainment expenses, utilities, rent- everything that you expend on your company.
- A detailed snapshot can help you assess the financial health of your organization- where payments are stuck, which collections are to be made, upcoming payments and purchases, unexpected purchases, and miscellaneous spending.
Once you have all this data with you, you can go ahead and start planning a spending strategy that works in favor of elevating your financial grounding.
When devising a spend management strategy post expense analysis, it is important to bear in mind that segregation of expenses is not the goal. A broad overview of spends can only be obtained when all the expenses are included- be it T&E or AP.
If Travel & Entertainment expenses form a vast chunk of overall spends for your company, they need to be definitely included in the spends management.
Usually, T&E expenses are borne on company cards given to all employees who travel for business purposes. In rare cases, employees have to bear business expenses out of pocket in the absence of cards or a vendor who doesn’t accept cards.
The total absence of T&E cards from a travel program leads to inefficient spend management since the employees bear not only the expense but also the interest cost for that business expense.
Employees, then have to wait for at least a month to get reimbursed for their own money which they spent on behalf of the company. Such kinds of practices can be avoided if you invest in a smart spend management platform.
Let’s have a look at the Expense Management Tool exclusively designed by EnKash.
Traditional Way Of Working Capital Management
Most often, it is seen that businesses separate their Accounts Payables from the rest of the expenses. Some companies outsource their AP to third-party spend management platforms that charge a hefty fee to process these transactions.
On the other hand, some businesses either rely on an in-house finance division to handle these expenses manually. This takes up a lot of time and energy and also makes the transactions prone to manual errors or non-compliance.
In one case, you are spending to pay for your purchases and on the other hand, you are wasting precious time on non-revenue generating tasks. Either way, your business spends are not functioning in an ideal manner which could lead to a cumbersome recalibration of accounts.
The Solution – EnKash Spend Management Software
To put an end to this nightmare, invest early on in an efficient corporate card & spends management platform like EnKash. It has a powerful spend management platform that has not only a spend visibility dashboard but also tools like corporate cards and virtual cards to sort out your expenses digitally.
With EnKash expense management software, you can easily club all your expenses on a single-point dashboard which increases visibility and control manifold.
EnKash also offers a huge variety of corporate cards powered by banks for all kinds of business expenses. A few handpicked business cards are;
- Purchase cards
- T&E cards
- Meal cards
- Fuel cards
- Forex cards
- Gift cards
- Payroll cards
- EMI cards
- E-commerce seller cards.
These could be preloaded corporate cards that are distributed to employees or teams by the finance teams. It can be used at the authorized network of merchants till the preloaded amount is exhausted.
Benefits of spend management and corporate cards
Along with spend management software, you can also use virtual cards which are perfect for one-off payments, subscriptions, and one-time expenses. With the help of corporate cards, empower your employees with the freedom to spend while retaining control over the expenditure. Eliminate maverick spending, expense fraud, and manual labor using digital corporate cards.
Coupled with EnKash’s intuitive spend management platform, these cards become the perfect tool to enhance your experience. It provides real-time tracking and reconciliation of expenses along with customized usage policies and guidelines which help in keeping budgets in check.
Automation and digital payments are the cornerstones of a new era in the corporate expense world where flexibility and adaptability are the biggest concerns. With EnKash, never miss a payment, never overspend, and never go off-track. We are here for all your money matters because we understand that money matters.