Last editedOct 20222 min read
Visibility and transparency are essential when taking control of your company’s finances. To make informed strategic decisions and ensure sufficient cash flow, you need to track your company’s spending in real time. This is why proactively tracking your company’s expenses is so essential. It enables you to make informed decisions about capital expenditure, get a clear idea of operational overheads and ensure compliance with HMRC. It also helps you to identify systemic spending issues that are eating into your profit margins, and achieve the financial goals that lead to sustainable growth. Whether you’re a sole trader working from home or a bricks-and-mortar retailer, your expenses are a key component to track for your business to thrive.
However, as your operation grows in size, scope and complexity, keeping track of your expenses manually can be increasingly difficult. Xero is an invaluable tool for taking control of your finances, providing you with a centralised repository for all your financial data to chart bank balances, cash flow and much more. Xero also has over 1,000 third-party integrations to help you take control of your finances and streamline your procedures.
We’ve already looked at how integrations with GoCardless can aid cash flow and help businesses get paid faster by attaching payment links to Xero invoices. However, the platform also integrates with a broad range of Xero budgeting add-ons and expense tracking apps. Join us as we explore 5 of the best.
Xero expenses
Xero has its own application for managing expenses. And it’s no slouch. 2019 winner of both the AccountingWEB UK – Data & Expense Management Software of the Year and the UK Digital Accountancy Awards – Expense Management Software of the Year, it is a very strong offering designed to take the legwork out of tracking employee expenses.
Clever use of automation enables you to forego manual data entry and reconciliation. Employee expenses can be approved with a single click and on-the-road expenses like mileage and subsistence can be ‘snapped and sent’ to capture costs as they happen. This enables you to monitor employee expenses in real time.
Receipt bank
Still keeping all your receipts in an envelope stuffed in the back of your desk drawer? No matter how large or how small your operation, your business can benefit from using Receipt Bank. Simply take a photo of your receipts and Receipt Bank converts them into data which is automatically uploaded to your Xero account in real time. This makes reconciliation effortlessly quick and helps businesses track their spending more effectively.
Expensify
Expensify is a very useful tool for operations with teams spending a lot of time on the road. Boasting some of the most accurate optical character recognition in the industry, Expensify makes it quick and easy to capture receipts on the go, while its corporate card reconciliation feature saves you the expense of hiring an accountant to reconcile your company cards every month. Accountants can also reimburse their clients the next day at no extra charge.
ExpenseOnDemand
ExpenseOnDemand is a very flexible tool that could save you money when tracking your expenses. It has over 120 functions, and you only pay for the functions that you actually use. This makes it a highly scalable tool to help you track expenses as your company grows in turnover, costs and complexity.
And since the basic app costs just £1 (after a free 30-day trial), there’s absolutely no harm in giving it a try.
Expensemanager
Expensemanager is a Xero budget visibility app that gives SMEs everything they need to manage expenses in a single platform.
You can track, approve and manage expenses, as well as communicating data from supplier invoices, purchase orders and travel expenditure directly to Xero.You can also seamlessly access your Xero bills and linked Expensemanager claims from both systems to ease operational efficiency.
We can help
GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.
