How can Businesses Spring Clean Their Finances in 2021?

The beginning of spring marks the beginning of change. This would translate into a fresh coat of paint and cleaning every nook and cranny for households. But for companies, this would translate into fixing broken processes, dusting off old books, and polishing up the rest Finances.

In the dynamic nature of today’s economic climate, re-evaluating strategies in an annual meeting just won’t cut it. Instead, businesses must keep a watchful eye on all core business metrics to ensure scalability and sustainability.

But where do businesses start? We’ve crafted this quick read to help companies achieve their financial spring cleaning goals in 2021. Let’s dive in!

Where do businesses start with their financial spring cleaning? 

There are two ways organizations can go about this:

1. Identifying and fixing manual processes ridden with challenges at all stages of the process.
2. Switching to an automated software to ensure accurate business financials.

P.S If you’re a business owner looking to upgrade and maintain a solid financial status for your business, this second option is for you.

But before we dwell on the details, remember that financial advice isn’t a one-stop -shop for any business. So, try to understand and craft your process depending on the stage and needs of your business.

Four ways businesses can start with cleaning their finances:

• Re-organize and declutter information

Before you jump right into the messy financial details, ensure you’ve gathered and collated enough financial information from reports and documents. Ensure you pay attention to reports around financial statements, income records, loans, and credit card statements.

Why should businesses organize their finances?

• Provides information into organization-wide expenses based on required parameters.
• Easily tracks expenses across projects, budgets, departments, and cost centers.
• Enables data-driven insights into spending habits and patterns across the company.
• Gives real-time insight into company finances that help businesses take timely action.
• Focus on documentation and analysis

Once your team can depict the breakdown of all process flows, narrow down specific departments, categories, or budgets that need reevaluation. Ensure your teams extensively document all findings.

Things to keep in mind: 

• Look for financial leaks through data entry errors, duplicate expenses, and even expense fraud.
• Be sure to be on the lookout for spend patterns and habits around categories, cost-centers, and departments.
• Identify bad spending practices and other unnecessary software subscriptions or plans.
• Pick out different areas of overspending across departments and budgets, if any.

With the above information, allocate weekly or monthly calls to discuss action points with appropriate stakeholders. That would be an excellent second step to cleaning your records.

Leverage technology to bridge the gap

Not just Finance, but every core business function can improve by adopting the right collaboration tools. For example, productivity no longer depends on location or the physical presence of your employees to get the job done.

Take, for instance, these core business functionalities that benefit from digital transformation:

• Project Management Software – Establish seamless communication across employees and departments, establish goals, objectives, and accountability and effortlessly manage remote projects and employees.
• Documentation and Storage tools – Eliminate the worry around lost documents, un-updated reports, and the need for in-person meetings to get the job done. No matter the location of your employees, enjoy centralized data collaborations.
• Communication and Collaboration tools – Blur geographical boundaries and gift your employees the best thing ever – a platform where they can collaborate, communicate, share and work on The  from anywhere in the world, using any device they want.
• Video conferencing tools – Let your business run, as usual, remote or not. Leverage these free and sometimes paid tools to help your employees connect and contribute from the comfort of their homes to build a sustainable and scalable remote workforce.
• Expense Management Software – Automate, streamline and manage all business expenses, corporate card reconciliations, and more. Make expense management as easy as 1,2,3 for your employees and Finance teams with an expense   Work management software that does the heavy lifting instead.

Control your business expenses with an expense software

Manual spreadsheet-based reporting always results in errors, and the count will only increase with remote work. This means your finances are at stake with multiple hidden costs, fraud, and inaccurate expenses floating around.

This is where an expense software comes into play. It takes over and automates error-prone and tedious tasks and makes expense reporting hassle-free for employees and Finance teams alike. It also gives Finance teams complete control and visibility into company expenses that help them make data-driven decisions around budgets, policies, and overall company finances.

Additionally, it runs real-time policy checks on all expenses right at the source of expense creation. Here, it flags and lets employees know how their expenses led to a policy violation and how to correct it. This not only saves Finance teams time and effort but also seamlessly enforces policy compliance throughout the organization.

The software also checks all expenses for expense fraud and, depending on the severity of the violation, escalates the issue with zero extra effort. This ensures all your business expenses are compliant and your finances are safe with no financial leaks.

Constantly evaluate and monitor new process changes

On implementing new changes, the next crucial step is to evaluate and monitor their impact. Then, divide your observations into operational and non-operational process improvements and measure the ROI on efficiency and productivity.

For instance, by evaluating business expenses, Finance teams can identify borrowing and spending patterns to optimize on. Or, if all traveling employees seem to book rooms in the same hotel chains or use the same airlines to commute, executives can negotiate better discounts that give your company the best deal.

Monitoring this data in real-time will help Finance teams reevaluate budgets as and when needed. Further, it helps create a well-rounded strategy to ensure that neither the employees nor the company suffer a financial loss.

Conclusion

Every core financial process, if done manually, opens up rooms for manual errors and fraud. As a result, businesses have been taking advantage of an expense report software to automate their broken processes and wrike custom workflows. This saves enormous amounts of time, resources, and effort while also eliminating chances of error.

Having a transformational mindset enables Finance teams to become pivotal in the company’s existence during this crisis. In addition, ensuring financial sustainability and a thriving financial and business model for remote work ensure that the organization thrives in the upcoming series of new normals.