It can take a while to start seeing a regular flow of cash after a business launches, but business expenses are visible from the start. Managing those expenses is a fundamental part of operating a business, even if it isn’t a very glamorous part.
No company can afford to ignore expenses, yet few entrepreneurs or freelancers take an online course in managing business expenses before they launch. Instead, it’s just another one of those skills that business owners and freelancers learn as they run their companies. With the right tools — and we’ll get to those in a bit — you can implement an online expense management process tailored for your business.
Understanding the basics of expense management
Every business has expenses. It simply comes with being a going concern. Properly processing, tracking, and recording when you incur and pay for those expenses are essential steps in ensuring you keep accurate accounts. It’s good business practice to track and analyze expenses for travel, office supplies, software, services, and the occasional office emergency. Not only does this help you determine if your company is getting value for what it’s spending, but many of these expenses are tax deductible — if you properly account for them.
A good expense management process helps you avoid paying too much for items or overlooking those deductible expenses. Automating expense management is well worth the upfront effort, even if you’re the owner and the only employee, because it helps you stay focused on your goals while keeping on top of spending.
Appreciating the importance of expense management
About 10 percent of the budget of the typical company goes for what is broadly categorized as expenses. Processing and paying many small expenses can be a real challenge, but for many companies, these expenses cumulatively amount to the difference between making a profit and recording a loss. Expense management is such an important business process because it’s simply too easy for busy people to overlook little expenses as they occur. If careful expense management reduces cumulative expenses by just percent, that one percent difference still goes directly to the bottom line.
Managing employee expenses effectively requires clear rules on reporting. Remember, the company can reimburse an employee for any expense it deems fit, but it can only deduct the expenses the IRS deems legal. Collecting paper receipts and organizing all of them once a year at tax time is not just a time-consuming way to handle the process — it’s also far more likely to result in reporting errors than using an online system. That’s why it’s best to automate the expense management process from the beginning. The switch from a paper system to digital just gets harder as those paper records accumulate.
But even gig workers and entrepreneurs need to manage their expenses appropriately, especially in the earliest stages of launching their companies when they might describe their cash flow as a trickle. No matter the size of your company, using tools that can help you capture, track, and manage your expenses can save you a lot of time, money, and hassle.
Simplifying expense management with Jotform
A well-run business can account for every penny spent and earned, and implementing an automated expense management process is an effective way to make sure you can do that. Jotform makes it easy and painless to get yours started with expense report templates. Jotform templates simplify the process of tracking expenses, which is essential for managing cash flow and optimizing tax deductions.
If a company is slow to reimburse employees for recurring daily expenses, it will quickly sap team morale. You can avoid those pitfalls by having your team file their expenses with a Jotform daily expense report template. A Jotform expense reimbursement form customized to your requirements also makes it easy to continually update the status of business expense reimbursements.
And just imagine how your team would perform if you started running low on coffee and related supplies. Using petty cash is generally the way to handle these small office emergencies, and Jotform has a petty cash log template that makes it simple to track these kinds of expenses and keep everyone happy.
With a Jotform balance sheet template, you can check where your company stands financially from any device, and you can easily export all Jotform templates to Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, and many other platforms using one of Jotform’s 100+ integrations.
Every well-run business has a thorough expense management process. Jotform makes it easy to get your process up and running quickly and smoothly.
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