How automating expense management can help save time & grow your business

Shweta Narayanan
3 min readNov 20, 2020

Have you ever asked yourself what could be the most important factor that determines the success of a business? Undoubtedly one of it would be the ability of the business to manage finances, including managing the day-to-day & other expenses.

An effective cash flow management system naturally boosts the financial health of an organization, more so when the business is in its nascent stage.

But managing expenses manually is exhausting!

Expense management can be tedious, especially for small businesses, where there is no concrete system in place to handle the expense data. For example, we know business travel contributes significantly to the overall expense of an enterprise. It takes a lot of manual labour AND hours to check, verify & account for these expenses by going through hundreds if not more, receipts.

It involves a series of steps, including allocating sufficient funds, approving expense requests, and then reimbursing & reconciling them. Additionally, you need cross-checking to figure out if there are duplicate entries before processing the reimbursement requests.

Sounds complicated? That’s because it is.

So what’s the better way to manage your expenses?

Well, there’s something unique that’ll help you save a lot of time, besides becoming a pro at it. You can save all these cumbersome steps and prioritize the most important tasks for your business by using Open’s expense management solution.

Erase all your expense management worries with Open!

Open is the ultimate solution for all small business owners who are looking to speed up, simplify, & organize their expense management process.

Now, before we jump into the details of Open’s expense management solution, let’s have a look at how small businesses usually go about filing expenses.

With young businesses, it can be really hard to manage all expenses for even a team of 5 salespeople travelling to different locations. The expenses can be anything from hotel bills to food bills, to travel expenses, and more.

You need to collect all these bills, file them, and then reconcile them at the end of every month for creating a monthly expense report. It can take anywhere from 3 days to a week depending on the work that you are putting into it.

You can easily dodge this hectic process by opting for Open’s expense cards that allow you to assign any number of cards to your employees, which makes it easy for them to spend while they travel. You can easily track all their expenses in one place without even intervening. On a real-time basis whenever they swipe these expense cards, you’ll be notified and it will be updated on the Open dashboard.

These expense cards can be virtual or physical, depending on your team’s needs. It will be integrated with Open’s online bank account you get once you sign up on the platform. The only thing you need to do is to make funds available. That’s it.

Open’s expense cards allow employees to make payments wherever cards (credit or debit) are accepted. As soon as your employees swipe the card to pay the bill, it will send a WhatsApp pop-up to the employee, asking them to click a picture of the receipt and send the same for records. This way you can view all the expenses happening on a real-time basis.

You can then verify these expenses sent by the employee. And then you can approve these expense receipts in just a click. This way it’s easy to automate expense management to get a bigger picture of the entire business spends.

Smarter expense management solution for small businesses!

Open’s expense cards have made it easier for small business owners to focus on essential but mundane tasks without wasting their valuable time.

To just try out I would suggest you opt for the 14 days limited period but a free trial offer from Open and explore all the features they provide, including their expense management solution. So what’re you waiting for — sign up on Open today and automate your expense management process!

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Shweta Narayanan

Micro-Finance | Passionate in serving Entrepreneurs & Small Businesses