User Review
( votes)Why Dynamics GP Integration is Critical for Expense Management
Better Control Company Spending
For many organizations using Microsoft Dynamics GP, slow expense approvals and drawn-out reimbursements are time consuming and inefficient. Company spending policies are difficult to enforce, letting extraneous spending periodically slip through. Automating the expense management process offers opportunities to reduce costs, boost efficiency and improve visibility. Subsequently, this form of automation can help to free up employees to focus on more strategic financial business.
According to Levvel Research, many organizations across market segments remain hesitant about automation and apprehensive about its practicality. This is most likely due to a lack of awareness. In reality, if these organizations adopted a new posture on automation, they could benefit significantly by integrating their Dynamics GP ERP solution for expense automation.
The View From the Mid-Market
According to the Levvel analysis of 2018 travel and expense management data, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) tend to have significantly lower levels of automation as compared to giant enterprises with hundreds or even thousands of suppliers. Levvel studies show that 54% of organizations surveyed use a combination of spreadsheets and scanned receipts or mailed paper receipts. 28% use a dedicated, cloud-based expense management software system and 18% have an expense management system combined with their ERP.
Small manufacturers, finance and non-profit groups are among the least automated SMEs, while business and professional services or oil and gas tend toward higher levels of automation. This most likely corresponds with the high cost of cloud-based expense management solutions; this phenomenon is prohibitive for many SMEs, especially when they continue to pose process and system integration issues.
Manual data entry is a defining characteristic of organizations that haven’t yet taken steps toward automation. Employees in these organizations are often left to retype or copy and paste data from documents, even when they receive them by email, and continue to send paper receipts to their accounts payable department. Because of inefficient processes stemming from manual entry and long reimbursement cycles and lack of visibility into spending, these organizations often experience high costs processing expense reports and difficulty enforcing their company travel policies. Further complexities arise because of project-based management and small departments all routing documents by hand or as email attachments.
Enterprise Perspectives
Although enterprises tend toward higher levels of automation, they still face expense management challenges such as lack of visibility, manual entry, poor employee productivity, extraneous spending, and enforcing company policies. In contrast to SMEs, enterprises tend to rely heavily on applications integrated with their existing ERP, making upgrades more difficult.
Research has found that one third of enterprises are planning to upgrade their expense management solution within the next three to five years. But these organizations may face a much more complex changeover process due to their advanced ERP integration needs.
Benefits of Automated Expense Reporting
Once an organization has defined the scope of its expense management needs, the next step is to begin implementing automation processes. Digital receipt capture and automated approval routing combined with integration with Dynamics GP can allow employees to photograph paper receipts using their mobile devices and submit them for processing. Integrating corporate cards yields a more comprehensive view of spending and lets auditors and approvers spot potential compliance issues or selectively approve and reject parts of reports.
The term “dynamic escalation” means that reports can be routed to specific departments or approval stages in a timely manner. Process automation can offer improved clarity that approvers lacked before. Autonomous auditing capabilities can identify possible inefficient or fraudulent spending as well as offer real-time spending insights broken down by department.
Reaching the Next Phase of Expense Management
Faced with rising expense management costs and accessibility demand, mid-market firms and enterprises can only benefit by adopting the myriad of capabilities available with an automated expense management integrated with their Dynamics GP ERP system. Following integration, companies will see enhanced efficiency, cost and time savings, as well as spending insight that will benefit future operations and help organizations thrive in the marketplace.
