Spreadsheets are generally considered to be the most useful tool in managing the finance of your organization. And once you have the entire data stored within the spreadsheets, you could then use it for analysis or presentations via graphs, charts as well as feed it into future decision making processes of your organizations. By adding formulas to a spreadsheet you could build automatic calculations in the template reviewing, tracking the expenses against the established budgets. Given below are the 8 major tips to that would help you manage your business expenses through spreadsheets at a great ease.
Begin with the receipts that you currently have: Anything that has been wadded in the purse, stashed in a catch all basket have them written down in the tracker according to the category that they fall, along with their payment type. These kind of expenses would never give you a complete picture, but that’s ok clean state remember.
Time and Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets are generally considered to be a manual process, and manual would here again mean time consuming. Starting from employees to administrator time to the sales people executives when you tally up the hours being spent on manual process converting them into dollars the costs are significant. Each and every person hired in your organization is hired for a specific job and when you are paying for the job that they are doing your business here is then losing out the money minute by minute.
Separating your personal and business expenses: Though this is something that would turn out to be obvious, placing once single expense could completely throw off your budget tracking. So if possible try to use different cards for all the different types of expenses. Sorting by payment method is one of the best ways to separate personal expenses from businesses to spreadsheets.
Learning simple functions in order to manage spreadsheets: Tracking down your expenses is considered to be worthless if you cannot extrapolate the data. Learning how to add, multiply and subtract, dividing different rows and columns is considered to be the most important for a successful expense reporting.
Efficiency and accuracy: Having so many touch points and many people being involved, a manual process would here open the doors for many errors while you are dealing with the expenses of your business organization. Say for example while you are dealing with the spreadsheets you could be something that is similar to this having a purchase done, having the receipts maintained for every purchase that is done, compiling the receipts, downloading the excel sheets, scanning the receipts, finding time to sit down at the computer and open excel.
Graph, Email, Save and Print: Similar to all the other learning functions in a spreadsheet it is important that you also know how to make graphs of your data on your spreadsheets. Graphs give you a clear picture on all the expenses made related to your organization and are considered to be very meaningful. Spreadsheets on programs like Microsoft excel are never saved in cloud so in case your computer dies then you are having a bad luck.
Slow process: After hours of manual entry the spreadsheets here are then sent to the manager for signature. The report would then take up days, and once approved it would be sent to the employees for being reimbursed. The workflow is then filled with emails and attachments which again turns out to be a slow, inefficient and ultimately expensive gift.
Centralised information: The person who generally inputs or adds the entire information into the spreadsheets, would continue to see the same and entire information that the managers would generally see. Now the entire transparency process would here depend on you.
Mobile Technology: Mobile technology has been successful in changing the way people operate and manage everything in their life. The travellers here demand of mobile connectivity and the ability to work from anywhere whereas the spreadsheet mentality would here not support that nor could scale with the entire process in the way it operates and has been operating.
To conclude smart companies are using spreadsheets that would help them manage their business expenses at a great ease and without any difficulty. So what are your thoughts of managing your business expenses through spreadsheets? Do leave your thoughts and comments below and we would be happy to add them to the list above.
Author Bio:
Shivli Ratul is a freelancer and has experience of over 5 years in expense and travel management softwares.She has in-depth knowledge about managing travel and different type expenses incurred in business.she writes about Expense Report Management software as a freelancer
