How to Select the Best Expense Management Software for Your Field Sales Operations?

In a fast-paced business environment, wherein field sales teams tend to close deals on the road, managing expenses related to on-field sales may feel overwhelming. From marketing expenses and fuel usage to reimbursement, the costs of the field sales team can swiftly pile up if you fail to keep track of your sales workflows and seek updates from your team members. Though this process may feel tedious when tracking varied aspects manually, that’s where expense management software comes to your rescue!

The expense management solution strives to streamline the process of tracking, submitting, and approving expenses occurring amid sales reps, fosters saving your time, and makes informed decisions at the right time with accuracy. But here’s the catch - how do you choose the best expense management software best suited to your field operations and other workflows?

The critical answer lies in finding a suitable solution that simplifies your expense reporting process and aligns with the field sales team’s requirements. From automating expense submissions to offering real-time insights, your ideal expense management software must transform how you manage your field sales costs.

Sounds interesting? This guide will explore detailed aspects organizations must consider when choosing the best expense management software. We will also walk you through a few benefits and features of this software to help you make accurate decisions for your sales efforts.

Top Factors To Consider While Selecting an Expense Management Software

Before you begin evaluating varied expense management software to maximize your sales and marketing operations, you must consider a few factors to streamline sales workflows and deploy effective expense management. Let's examine these considerations in more detail.

1. Automated Expense Management

The main reason for shifting to the best expense management software for organizations is to reduce time spent on manual expense data entry and avoid the occurrence of expense reporting tasks.

In addition, automated tasks tend to be completed with minimum employee assistance and streamline the process of tracking, reporting, and managing field expenses - all under one roof! As a sales manager or higher authority, you must look for an expense management solution that includes capabilities such as schedule expense report generation, automated policy enforcement (wherein the system automatically flags non-compliant expenses in real-time), automated data entry direct from digital receipts, and more.

Sounds too good to be true, isn’t it? These capabilities of expense reporting software will assist your organization in minimizing human errors in expense reports and enable field employees to invest their time in closing more deals, enhancing customer relationships, and transforming lead conversion rates.

Furthermore, look for how expense reporting software can help you manage your overall operational spending. This means you must seek functionalities like a user-friendly interface to simplify navigation and adoption rates for submitting reports for employees and streamline the process of tracking expenses, generating reports, and making informed decisions for managers.

2. Scalability and Flexibility with Expense Management

As your business grows over time, the requirements for expense and financial operations for your field sales team will also change. This is why it is essential to select expense management software that can help you expand your company and evaluate various aspects according to your objectives.

Additionally, scalability refers to the capacity of an expense management solution to accommodate high volumes of expenses or receipts as the business expands. This approach typically includes managing multiple users or employees, tracking a more significant number of expense categories, managing many transactions, and more.

By selecting scalable expense management software, your organization would not have to pay for expensive systems or rely on repetitive, tedious updates. Instead, install this software upfront and continue your business with flexibility.

3. Robust Reporting and Analytics Functionality

Features like reporting and analytics in your expense reporting software can simplify turning unprocessed raw data into valuable and actionable insights, enabling informed decisions at the right time.

In addition, a robust expense management solution must provide adaptable and user-friendly reporting features to allow businesses to track and analyze varied aspects of an organization's spending. This approach typically includes generating comprehensive reports that break down field sales expenses by categories, per employee, department, trend analysis, and more to detect common patterns in spending and identify opportunities to save money and drive growth simultaneously.

Moreover, in-depth insights from expense reporting software can be acquired by accessing advanced analytics functionality, which also helps identify potential fraud, outliers in expense data, and areas where you have been spending more than needed.

4. Integration with Your Financial System

While evaluating the ideal expense management solution, ensure it easily integrates with your existing financial system. This includes synchronization with accounting and payroll platforms that you utilize in your regular workflows.

This integration will reduce the effort of manually transferring data and errors linked with smooth data flow between systems. By optimizing financial and expense management procedures, you can maintain financial records with consistent financial data across platforms to avoid disruption in field sales workflows.

By streamlining accurate data in one platform, businesses can get a clear picture of overall financial aspects. This will help you make precise resource allocation decisions, determine the budget for diverse campaigns, streamline reimbursements and payroll procedures, and effectively save money by identifying common patterns via expense management software.

5. Seamless User Experience and Adoption Rates

While selecting spending management software, ensure its interface is user-friendly, and easy to navigate for managers and employees. Looking for this feature is essential, as it minimizes the need for training field sales teams and enhances efficiency at the same time. Enhanced user experiences will speed up the expense submission process via mobile app and simplify scanning receipts and evaluating data for managers.

Benefits of Leveraging Expense Management System

Expense management tools can optimize the lives of field sales teams. Yes, you heard it right! By automating tracking , submitting, approving, evaluating, and managing expenses, this tool frees up valuable time for your field employees to focus on establishing meaningful relationships with new and existing customers and closing more deals.

Moreover, expense management offers real-time insights into your organization’s spending habits, helping you plan budgets adequately and focus on cost control. Let’s dive deeper to explore the benefits of incorporating expense management systems in your field sales operations.

Benefits

Time-saving

Automates the process of tracking and reporting expenses of field sales operations, and minimizes administrative burden

Compliance

Make sure adherence to your company’s policies and tax regulations while managing budgeting and expenses

Accuracy

Reduces errors in expense data entry, and streamlines evaluation, reporting process

Improved reimbursement process

Optimizes approval of digital receipts and payment process, which reduces delays and enhances employee satisfaction

Cost control

Allows businesses to plan effective budget and identify opportunities for saving cost effectively

Visibility

Offers insights into spending patterns of field sales teams, common trends in real-time

Must-Have Features To Look Out in an Expense Management Software

Expense management software has become an essential solution for field sales teams by optimizing procedures and ensuring accurate financial tracking and management. However, when selecting your ideal software, it is important for businesses to prioritize features that meet your field sales requirements.

1. Mobile Accessibility

Since field sales teams work nature is mobile and remote, they require software that provides effortless accessibility and functions on tablets and smartphones. As a sales manager, when you prioritize an expense management system, make sure it is user-friendly and includes functions like easy expense entry, photo uploads, and synchronization of expense data with a central database option.

2. GPS Tracking and Geolocation

To verify expense claims and ensure that the field sales team adheres to company policies, managers can autonomously capture location data and gather evidence of where expenses were incurred by selecting a spending management system incorporating a GPS tracking feature.

3. Policy Compliance and Alerts

Field sales teams often work under stringent expense policies, so when prioritizing software, make sure to choose features that enforce compliance aspects like predefined expense categories, expense limits, approval thresholds, and more. Moreover, this software must automate notifying employees and managers when expenses exceed the limit or when non-compliance issues occur.

4. Real-Time Visibility

Real-time visibility into expense data enables field sales managers to effectively manage overall expenses and enforce controls whenever required. The expense management tool must provide centralized dashboards and reports with updated insights into spending trends, budget utilization, policy compliance, and more. This approach will empower sales managers to make better decisions and identify suitable opportunities to cut costs, and save money.

5. Advanced Field Expense Reporting

A comprehensive reporting feature for expense management can help you analyze varied expenses, detect trends, and make data-driven decisions promptly. Select software that provides customizable reports like expense summaries, compliance evaluations, and budget comparisons.

Final Thoughts

When you choose your ideal expense management software for field sales workflows, prioritize solutions that provide real-time expense tracking, integration with your existing platform, mobile accessibility, and more. These core features will enable you to optimize the expense reporting procedure, allowing the field sales team added flexibility to manage expenses on the go and drive efficiency simultaneously.

Additionally, make sure the software offers advanced reporting and analytics functions to enforce robust controls over spending and enhance financial transparency. If you want to learn more about TrackOlap’s expense management feature, contact our team today or schedule a demo call right away !