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Tips to Make Tracking of Business Expenses Easy

If your budgets are leaking from an invisible hole, it is time to get your business expenses in order and on track as soon as possible.

Business expenses worry most small businesses on a monthly basis, and most small businesses find themselves in an indestructible trap of sorts. Controlling the allocation of budget, or restrict employee spending can be a real challenge. It is difficult to understand why the budget is draining irregularly.

The most efficient way of taking charge of business expenses is efficient and consistent tracking of business expenses. Tracking business expenses not only gives you a daily report on where your budget is going, but also keeps you abreast of the pattern of spending at your workplace.

There are actionable tips to manage tracking of business expenses confidently and efficiently. Here are a few that will help you keep tabs on your budgets and save money:

Get a business expense tracking software
One simple tool that instantly eases out business tracking is a business expense tracking software. Business expense tracking software takes charge of expenses from the basics to the most complex aspects of financial handling. This begins at the hand of the accounting department.

The accounting department can customize a business expense tracking software to fit your financial operations as they go. They can also feed into the tracking software a repository of your earlier transactional history. This gives the software enough data to train itself on and gives it the ability to become intuitive to your pattern of transactions.

Managers can access this software to allocate resources to different departments. And even with a free expense tracking software, employees can stay atop the budgets allocated to them. And all this can be done through an application on their mobile.

Also Read: 5 Things to Consider While Choosing Your Business Expense Tracking Software

Track your business expenses daily
No budget is drained suddenly at the end of a quarter. How you spend your budget daily reflects how you spend your budget entirely. This means at the end of every working day, you must inspect your expenditure, not necessarily in numbers but in some form of a visual representation.

If you are using a business expense tracking software, you will automatically get graphs and pie charts representing your daily spending. As the software is accessible on your mobile device, you can easily monitor your daily business expenses. The benefit of checking business expenses on a daily basis is multi-fold. From being constantly aware of your expenses, to managing financial reports and everything in between, you can do it all.

Automate business expenses
Once employees file in their business expenses, the managers have to shoulder the burden of collecting and verifying receipts manually. Their job can be made easier by by auto scanning the receipts.
With a business expense tracking software every one of your employees can upload their receipts and get them auto scanned and auto verified. Users can set up the verification process to fit their policies. And if a receipt gets rejected, it goes through the manual review process, so every rejected receipt gets flagged. And the concerned authority can take up the action as it suits their company policy.

Also Read: Why You Need to Track Your Business Expenses?

Keep tax deductible expenses in check
Certain business expenses like travel, self-education, tools, laundry etc. are tax deductibles. Whenever you get into an account of business expenses, make a note of the tax deductibles. This of course can be done automatically, by profiling tax deductibles through a business expense tracking software. Or you can sift through receipts manually and bracket them into either tax deductibles or otherwise. This varies in every country, and in some cases in every state. So it is best to stay updated regarding this topic.

Tracking business expenses is an extremely crucial step for any business and can be challenging for some. Hope through the course of this read you were able to find some smart tips for business expense tracking.

Smart Tips for Setting Up a Small Business Budget

Creating and executing optimized budgeting strategies for businesses is extremely crucial for healthy finances.
Budget allocation is one thing, but running massive projects under tight budgets is always a tricky task for small businesses. To help you ace those tricky situations, here we have compiled an ultimate list of budgeting tips for business management. But, before we get into it, to implement any of the tips presented below, you have to understand the basic components of a business budget. Here are a few components that you should take cognizance of before you strategize budgeting for your business:

1. Your business should include an accurate description of the market you are functioning in, including any fluctuations in sight.
2. Budget’s alignment with your core ethics as a business, and your mission statement.
3. A detailed account of allocation of budget. Including additional details of overspending, and savings department-wise.
4. Analysis of your budgets thus far.
5. A short summary of the budget for reference.

The above five are the basic components of a business budget and can be taken as must haves in your next budget. With that out of the way, let’s get into a few smart tricks for strategizing your budgets:

Also Read: Clever Marketing Tips for Small Businesses on Budget

Defining fixed recurring expenditures
New budgeting strategies for businesses will only work if you take into account the primary expenditures as well. These are fixed costs that you will incur no matter the flow of the market. For example, office rent, payroll, hosting, resources required every month. Make an exhaustive list of fixed costs incurred by your business, and look through to identify which ones you can get rid of. Keep in mind that everything on this list will always be a part of your budget. Kindly note, that fixed costs in the context of budgeting do not include one-time costs like furniture/carpeting unless you are just starting out and haven’t recouped these.

Identify your revenue sources
With a basic list of fixed costs, now you can move on to understanding how you support your budget. What are the revenue generation channels? And how much is every channel bringing in, in terms of monetary value for your business.

These are nothing but your sales figure, combined with the attribution of source. So for example, if you are an online business, how much organic revenue generation is your business receiving, and how much of it is the sales team’s work (commissioned work).

Maintain an account of your cash flow categorically distributed across departments, and projects. This will later help you make fair resource allocations as well.

Also Read: 10 Tips for Small Businesses to Track Their Expenses

Pinpoint variable and one-time spending
Business operations are not linear; there are a lot of curvy lines on the graph of daily expenditure. That is why you need to be cautious of wasting precious resources on unimportant projects.

Most variable costs supplement fixed costs or one-time spends, like the purchase of a printer for office needs can be considered a one-time spend, but the ink cartridge would be considered a variable cost. Similarly, electricity, shipping, travel, food, and all other utility-based expenses come under variable costs.

One-time spending, however, are costs that you don’t incur every month but are done and dealt with one-time transactions. Things like furniture and resources like laptops, printers, etc. fall under this category.

It is important to exactly know where your daily expense is going because this is what will silently attack your budget. And a specific budget tank for these costs will save you the anxiety when a large financial burden is underway.

If all of the above is slightly daunting for you, it is highly recommended that you use a business expense tracking software. This will not only keep account of your expenses, but also give you estimates for your next budget.

Hope these three tips will help you devise a better budget for your small business.

Not Sure if You Should go for Cloud Invoicing Software? These Reasons will Convince You

It is not easy to invest in an additional software for business operations. And it is not just about the investment but the integration, the functioning, and the impact it will initially have due to delay of processing.

But what if we told you, there is a cloud invoicing software that will seamlessly integrate into your current operations and make your life at work easier than ever before?

How, you ask? Let’s dive right into it.

Revolutionize the way you get paid
Do you still have many pending or long overdue payments you don’t know how to approach? Do you realize that these build upon as liabilities for your business in the long run? To the point where you will just have to forget about these and move on.

With a simple free invoicing software you can generate invoices the way your clients like it. This means you can offer multiple payment channels, set up alerts on dues and further alerts on overdue payments.

You can periodically notify your clients about upcoming payments and include a possible charge when they miss the deadline on the invoice. All these are simple means to get paid quicker.

You can give your clients everything they need within the frame of a simple invoice generated via the cloud through a cloud based invoicing software. You’ll be surprised how you can invoke quick action through invoices shared via the cloud.

Also Read: Best Online Invoicing Software for Entrepreneurs

Simplify your transactions
Not only is it super easy to generate invoices via the cloud, but it is also exceedingly easy to share these invoices. More than just generating invoices manually every day, you can use a cloud invoicing software to automate invoicing.

Surely, you may have had recurring transactions for clients whom you have worked for on elaborate projects or smaller scale project. Creating fresh invoices for such services can be tedious. So, for basic transactions that involve little to no changes, you can set up recurring invoices using an invoicing software online.

Instant invoicing
Of all the things accounting departments despise at work, last minute changes top the list. Why wouldn’t they, considering the amount of number crunching and complicated paperwork they are supposed to keep track of in accounting and bookkeeping.

And at the last minute if your client wants a little more from you, and is willing to pay for an additional task, do you really want to decline because your invoices have been already generated? Or do you want to pressurize your already overworked accounting team?

Just download a cloud invoicing software and make last minute changes on professional-looking invoices in seconds through your mobile phone. All the data you need can be accessed from anywhere at any time since it is all stored on the cloud.

Securing your data
Speaking of the cloud, has your accounting department ever lost data files? Have you seen how hard accountants work to keep files intact and the blunder that may occur even if one single receipt is lost? You can avoid all that by using a free invoicing software.

Cloud based invoicing software stores all your transactional data over the cloud on secure servers. And you get complete control over who gets to access your financial data within your own team. Further, you can set up multiple backups to make sure you never lose important data. This means you don’t have to waste money on buying a server of your own.

Also Read: Bookkeeping Software and Small Business Cash Flow

Seamless integration
The best thing about cloud based invoicing software is its ability to seamlessly integrate into your existing business operations at every step of the way.

Hope these reasons convince you to switch. You can also download CloudBooks that offers a 30-day free trial to check if suits your needs.