Enterprise software vendors have paid little heed to three things:
- Uncomplicated implementation
- Easy and elegant user experience
- Innovation for the evolving nature of problems
Made for and sold to business decision-makers in the corporate hierarchy, the end-user experience is the last of concerns for enterprise software vendors. Their products are made for managers, not employees. It was around 2010 that consumer-centric software started to take over the market. This changed everything for both legacy companies and cloud/SaaS startups that provide enterprise solutions. The end-user experience has become a key market driver ever since.
Expense management software is no exception. Employee expenses are the second largest controllable expense after payroll, and the result of such a process breaking has unflattering consequences for all stakeholders involved. Besides, expense reporting is the single most frustrating task for employees and accountants alike. However, enterprises continue to make-do with clunky software because – “Hey, it does the job!”
Does it? A simple hashtag search on Twitter for #ExpenseReports will reveal if employees feel the same way.
“Enterprises need the control that they do, but employees deserve ease of use too.”
Built to solve problems that Finance teams and employees face with expense management in the 21st century, Fyle leads with innovation in the expense management segment.
A brief overview of Fyle
Fyle was founded in 2016 by Yashwanth Madhusudan and Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan to put an end to the frustration that comes with expense management. Since then, Fyle has been introducing innovative features that help companies automate expense management end-to-end. Fyle has had features like multi-org, multiple expense tracking options, expense flagging and real-time visibility into spends from day 0. Most other players, even those who have been in the market for over a decade are still just planning on implementing these.
Co-Founders of Fyle
Over the last four years, we have created a new standard in expense management that blends consumer-grade experience with enterprise-grade control. From implementation to support, Fyle strives to deliver seamless user experience, enhanced control, and automated compliance.
Q2: What industries do you cater to, and who are your current customers?
Fyle is an AI-powered expense management software that caters horizontally to small and mid-market businesses in the US with employee size 50-500. Some of our customers include FMG Law, TST Construction, One Wind, and more.
Q3: What is an expense management software? Why is it important for businesses?
Most businesses generate a massive number of employee expense reports every month. These reports flow through complex approval workflows before they reach Finance teams for reimbursement processing.
In such cases, it is easy for reports to go missing or fraudulent claims to slip through due to expense management’s labor and time-intensive nature. This affects the turnaround time for employee expense reimbursements, but it might result in inaccurate financial reporting, opening the business up to audits when left unchecked.
An expense management software helps streamline and automate all expense management processes to eliminate the need for manual intervention, starting from tracking business expenses to credit card reconciliation and expense reimbursement. All of this while ensuring a constant state of audit-readiness.
Q4. What are the most common challenges different stakeholders face with expense management? How does Fyle help address these challenges?
Expense management throws different challenges to different stakeholders in the process. Fyle offers tailor-made features to solve each of these challenges.
Challenges employees face with respect to expense reporting:
- Tracking and safekeeping of all business expense receipts
- Manually filling out expense reports and submitting them on time
- Delays in reimbursement because of non-compliance or processing delays
- Remembering company travel and expense policies
How does Fyle help solve expense reporting woes for employees?
Fyle offers employees numerous ways to track business expense receipts, whether they are paper or electronic. Users can scan paper receipts using Instafyle, Fyle’s receipt scanner, which automatically extracts relevant data from receipts and fills all necessary fields, making expense tracking a one-click deal. Users can also send expenses to Fyle using text messages, email forwarding, G-Suite add-in, Outlook add-on, Slack, WhatsApp, or upload multiple receipts at once using Bulkfyle.
Challenges Finance teams face with respect to expense management:
- Lack of visibility into employee expenses
- Lack of organized and immediate insight into expense data analytics
- Manual verification and validation of individual expense claims
- Manually matching credit card statements with transactions for reconciliation
- Moving employee and expense data between softwares for financial reporting
How does Fyle help ease expense management for Finance teams?
Fyle checks every individual expense for policy compliance. It also flags any non-compliant expense before the claim is even submitted. It also records all actions taken on an expense in a detailed digital audit trail. All expenses, receipts, and reports are then saved to a unified, searchable expense management cloud. This ensures that the business remains in a state of constant audit readiness.
Fyle runs on a robust business rules engine that can enable rule based additional approvals wherever necessary.
Since the software checks for compliance based on the business rules and ensures no non-compliant claims are processed, compliance is automated. This eliminates the need for Finance teams to audit every expense manually. Next, Fyle integrates seamlessly with any accounting, HRMS, and travel software. Additionally, Fyle comes with APIs that developers can build custom apps on top of. Full integration of Fyle with other business software makes moving data in and out of Fyle easy. It also puts an end to manual data entry.
Fyle also allows Finance teams to manage multiple corporate credit card vendors from their expense management dashboard. Fyle connects with the credit card providers to get direct feeds and allows you to store multiple card statements directly to the account. It then also automatically matches transactions with statements while also checking them against set expense policies. You can also upload credit card statements and auto-match transactions with Fyle’s universal statement parser. This makes credit card reconciliation painless yet effective.
Since the software eliminates manual work and data entry errors from the equation, Finance teams can focus on financial planning. With real-time visibility into spends, and analytics on top spenders, top spend categories, risk scores, and suspicious behavior; Finance teams can identify risks without relying on employees to submit reports.
Challenges CFOs face with respect to expense management:
- Real-time visibility and insight into spends across departments/entities
- Accurate budget forecasting and controlling overheads
- Identifying missed opportunities or potential risks
How does Fyle help ease expense management for CFOs?
Fyle’s CFO dashboard shows centralized, live data around spends, expenses, approvals, payments, and finance operations across all projects, departments and entities. It also shows real-time data for spends v/s budgets and gives CFOs an insight into suspicious behavior or overspending.
Access to real-time data helps them stay on top of their finance team’s productivity, overall expense behavior and mitigate risks before they happen.
Q5: According to a survey by American Express, employee expenses are the second-largest controllable cost for businesses. However, expense report fraud costs businesses about $1.9B annually. As experts in expense management, what measures has Fyle incorporated to eliminate fraud?
Whether deliberate or just innocent data entry errors, expense report fraud is easy to slip through. This is especially true in manual and paper or Excel based expense management processes. Fyle’s business rules engine allows admins to design complex rules or policies based on different employee or expense parameters, projects, categories, departments, and cost centers.
Fyle ensures every expense is compliant right at the source of expense creation. It also notifies important stakeholders of violations automatically. This guarantees no expense fraud every slip by.
Additionally, Fyle comes with features like risk score and advanced data analytics that provide real-time insight into top spenders/policy violators. This helps businesses to always keep a check on their bottom line.
Q6: What factors should enterprises consider while evaluating expense management software? (A checklist)
Enterprises usually have complex processes and require superior control over access and security. Often, this need overshadows the importance of ease of use for employees.
Here is a checklist of essential features and capabilities enterprises should check for with expense management vendors:
- Ease of expense receipt tracking for employees
- Business rules and approval workflow automation
- Integrations with accounting software like Quickbooks, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Xero
- Automatic credit card reconciliation
- Real-time insight into spend data analytics
- Innovation and scalability
- Onboarding and implementation timelines, process, and support quality
- Support/help resources about the software for different stakeholders
Before you finalize, check for customer reviews on various websites to understand if the vendors deliver what they promise.
Q7: What are Fyle’s key features? How do they compare to other expense management software available in the market?
Finance teams play a more vital role in making strategic decisions than they did ten years ago. This means it is not enough for an expense management software to simply automate approval workflows and check for policy compliance. It should also be intelligent enough to provide Finance teams with the right data and insight at all times. Fyle is built for them.
Further, Fyle is most loved for its innovative expense tracking features and its ease of use. With easy tracking, automatic data extraction, and helpful flagging, employees submit compliant reports on the go. Fyle also helps employees submit reports on time so that the Finance team can close books on time.
Here are Fyle’s product groups that automate expense management end-to-end:
- Expenses: Automated expense reporting, from tracking receipts, auto-check for policy compliance to submitting compliant reports. Features to eliminate manual work from expense reporting once and for all.
- Cards: Integrations with multiple credit card vendors, universal parsing, automatic reconciliations, and easy transaction reversals/refunds. Makes credit cards management effortless and fully automated.
- Approvals: Highly customizable approval workflows, automatic submissions/approvals/reminders, policy-driven additional approvals and more. All while ensuring continuous compliance.
- Compliance: A robust business rules engine, digital audit trails, a unified and searchable receipt storage cloud that keeps the company in an audit-ready state. Features like fraud detection help businesses identify any potential fraud or threats beforehand.
- Budgets: Define budgets for projects, departments or cost centers and view spend data in real-time. Set budget timelines and get customized updates on budget compliance automatically.
- Payments: Drastically reduce errors, processing time, and turnaround time for expense reimbursements with Fyle via ACH and check reimbursement status in real-time. Or, direct export all employee and expense data in a bank-friendly format automatically.
- Analytics: Fyle’s advanced analytics collect spending data, use it in a context-aware manner to draw interpretations and make them available on your dashboard in real-time. Features like risk score helps you understand the risk associated with every expense to eliminate fraud in its early stages.
- Integrations: Fyle integrates with any accounting software including Quickbooks, NetSuite, Sage, Xero and HRMS software. It also integrates with any HRMS and travel software of your choice. Additionally, Fyle’s API integrations allow developers to build on top of Fyle to facilitate effortless movement of data from in and out of the system.
- Finance Operations: Finance teams can customize Fyle to automate the entire expense management process as it is. Fyle eliminates nothing but manual work and inefficiencies from the existing process, not disrupting the process to accommodate automated expense management.
Fyle’s expense management features are built with a vision to solve the evolving problem of expense management. Unlike most other software in the industry, which still solves pre-accounting problems from 10 years ago, Fyle leads with innovation. It retains enterprise-grade control for Finance teams/admins and offers user-grade experience for all stakeholders involved.
Q8: What are some sample use cases for Fyle?
Businesses have different goals for automating expense management. Here are four such use cases:
- Efficient project spend management: Fyle facilitates setting up rules for project-based compliance and budgets, making managing multiple project budgets easy.
- Digital transformation: Fyle helps streamline, automate, and centralize all operations around expense management to build a fool-proof expense management system to suit digital finance needs.
- Enhanced employee experience: Fyle’s experience-led expense tracking and reporting features make it easy for employees to submit reports and get reimbursed on time. This helps boost productivity and enhance employee delight.
- Paperless processes: Fyle’s quick implementation and customizability make switching from paper-based processes to the cloud simple and straightforward.
- Credit card reconciliation: Fyle automates credit card reconciliation from end-to-end. It gets direct feeds from credit card providers, matches transactions with statements automatically and allows easy refunds/reversals. With Fyle, Finance teams get visibility into credit card spends across the organization in real-time.
Q9: Looking into the future, what are some market trends or technologies you see on the rise in the expense management space? How does Fyle meet these?
2020 has changed the ways businesses function. It has proved just how vital automation can be during these times. All in all, here are our top 3 predictions for the expense management marketplace for 2021:
- Rise in the use of AI-led technology in expense management: With companies going remote or staying socially distant, it has become imperative for businesses to adapt. Automated expense management softwares is becoming prevalent as it helps reduce mundane tasks while eliminating human error. It also helps centralize expense management processes that are effective for both remote and in-office teams.
- Expense management vendors will step up their game concerning user satisfaction: Expense software vendors will extend support to resolve technical issues and help clients use the technology to their advantage. Vendors will begin to encourage clients to explore more of their product to understand how they can leverage it best to achieve success.
- The need to keep employees happy while eliminating operational roadblocks: With the current scenario at play, employee mental health and well-being will gain prevalence. Happy employees translate to enhanced employee morale and productivity. Hence, enterprises will start holding employee needs at par with management needs.
Does Fyle meet these requirements?
We are an automated expense management software built to address today’s real-world challenges. We deliver enterprise-grade control that companies need and the UX experience of their employees’ desire.
Fyle literally automates all things expense reporting—all of this without changing how Finance teams work. Our customizability makes it easy to plug and play without restricting any Finance processes or operations.
Additionally, we help identify and report anomalies to the right eyes at the right time. We also come with power-packed features like the risk score that ensure no dubious, overstated, holiday or non-compliant expenses get by. All this and more, without any extra effort or human intervention!
What sets Fyle apart is, unlike most legacy expense management software, we simplify and automate expense management for all the stakeholders involved. Be it the Finance teams, Accounting teams, Employees, Approvers, or even Business owners; we have everyone covered!
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