Keeping track of expenses is vital for any business, but it can be a real challenge to stay on top of spending across multiple channels.
Luckily, Bill.com offers robust features for streamlining expense management and gaining visibility into where your money is going.
In this post, we'll walk through how to configure Bill.com to monitor all your bills, credit card transactions, and employee expenses in one place. You'll also learn how to set budgets, customize reporting, and leverage dashboards to pinpoint spending - enabling tighter control over costs.
Introduction to Expense Management with Bill.com
Bill.com provides a powerful expense management solution to help businesses control spending and enforce budgets. By integrating with accounting software and automatically capturing expense data, Bill.com gives finance teams real-time visibility into costs.
Key benefits of using Bill.com for expense management include:
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Customizable Categories: Bill.com allows you to create customized categories to track expenses specific to your business. You can analyze spending by department, project, client and more.
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Automatic Data Capture: Expenses flow directly into Bill.com from supplier invoices and credit card feeds. This eliminates manual data entry and ensures accuracy.
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Reporting & Analytics: Robust reporting provides insights into expense trends over any date range. Charts and graphs visualize spending by category, helping you spot waste.
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Accounting Integrations: Seamlessly connect Bill.com to your GL to simplify expense reporting and reconciliation. Support for NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct and more.
With Bill.com, finance teams can ditch paper and spreadsheets for automated, accurate expense tracking. This leads to greater visibility into costs, easier budgeting and forecasting, and more informed spending decisions.
Understanding Bill.com for Business Finance
Bill.com is a versatile platform designed to optimize key finance functions for SMBs and enterprises. It serves as an end-to-end solution for:
- Accounts Payable Automation - Streamline AP workflows with electronic invoicing, approval routing, and payments.
- Accounts Receivable Management - Get paid faster with online billing, payment processing, and cash flow insights.
- Expense Management - Capture, report on, and control expenses seamlessly from any device.
This integrated approach connects the procure-to-pay process for complete visibility and control. Bill.com integrates with leading accounting tools for easy reconciliation.
Advantages of Financial Tracking in Bill.com
As a central finance hub, Bill.com provides accurate, real-time tracking of cash inflows and outflows. Key advantages include:
Real-Time Insights - With expenses flowing directly into Bill.com, finance teams gain an always up-to-date view of spending from any device.
Paperless Workflows - Say goodbye to boxes of receipts and invoices. Digital capture and approvals simplify reporting.
Compliance & Auditability - Detailed audit logs provide transparency into expense changes for improved compliance.
Cost Control - Analytic tools shine a light on wasteful spending so you can optimize budgets and forecasting.
In summary, Bill.com offers robust, easy-to-use expense tracking suitable for any size business. The platform empowers finance teams with insights and controls to make smarter spending decisions.
How do I keep track of my bills and spending?
Keeping track of bills and spending is critical for managing your finances. Here are 6 tips to help:
Use a budgeting app
Apps like Mint or You Need A Budget (YNAB) connect to your bank accounts and credit cards to automatically track your spending. They categorize transactions, alert you to upcoming bills, and provide reporting to analyze where your money is going. Using an app saves time and gives you a holistic view of cash flow.
Create a bill calendar
Make a spreadsheet with bill details like payment amount, website, due date, and payment method. Update it every time you have a new bill or change. Refer to the calendar regularly to ensure no payments are missed.
Set payment reminders
Use calendar alerts, phone notifications, or email reminders leading up to bill due dates. Automate reminders through your bank if possible. This prevents late fees and disruption of important services.
Review statements monthly
Even with apps and alerts, take time every month to review account statements. Watch for fraudulent charges, ensure accurate payment amounts, and confirm automated payments processed properly.
Note changes promptly
When changing financial accounts, addresses, cars, homes, jobs, etc., update relevant businesses right away. This ensures bills and statements route properly for on-time payment.
Audit annually
Conduct an annual financial review examining income, debt, asset allocation, unnecessary expenses, changes in tax situation, and savings goals. Adjust your financial tracking tools and bill payment approach accordingly.
How do you monitor spending?
Track as you spend. The most active approach is to carry around a notebook and pen wherever you go, writing down each transaction as you spend. Logging your spending in real-time helps you pay close attention to how often you spend money. It also encourages you to carefully consider every purchase.
Some tips for tracking expenses by hand:
- Record date, amount, category, and notes for each transaction. This info is key for analyzing spending later.
- Take photos of receipts as a backup if your handwriting is hard to decipher later.
- Designate a pocket or section in your bag for collecting receipts when you're out and about. Don't let them get lost!
- Transfer notebook transactions to a spreadsheet at least weekly. This digitizes your data for easy sorting, totaling expenses, spotting trends, budgeting, etc.
- Set calendar reminders to prompt you to log transactions. It's easy to forget on busy days.
The hands-on nature of writing each transaction makes you very aware of spending habits. This active monitoring approach takes discipline but works very well for cost control and sticking to a budget.
How do you keep a record of spending?
Keeping track of expenses is critical for businesses to control costs and make informed financial decisions. Here are some tips for recording spending in Bill.com:
Review Account Statements
One of the easiest ways to track expenses is to regularly check bank and credit card statements. This provides visibility into where money is being spent. In Bill.com, transactions can be automatically imported from connected accounts.
Categorize Expenses
Categorizing each expense makes it easier to see spending patterns. Bill.com has preset categories like Advertising, Office Supplies, Travel, etc. Additional custom categories can also be created. Properly categorizing expenses allows businesses to identify areas to reduce spending.
Use Reporting
Bill.com has built-in reporting to break down expenses by category, vendor, time period, and more. Reports can be customized as needed. Monitoring reports helps identify unnecessary spending and opportunities to cut costs.
Set Budgets
Creating budgets by department, category, or vendor is useful for expense control. Bill.com can track performance against budgets to hold teams accountable to spending limits. Getting alerts when exceeding budgets helps mitigate overspending.
Automate Workflow
Bill.com automation like scheduled payments and status tracking reduces manual work associated with paying vendors and recording expenses. This saves time and money while minimizing effort required to keep accurate financial records.
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Does Bill com do expense management?
Bill.com offers robust expense management capabilities as part of its financial operations platform. Specifically, its BILL Spend & Expense module provides the following key features:
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Streamlined expense reporting: Employees can easily submit expenses in just a few clicks via mobile or web. Receipts and details are captured and categorized automatically.
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Real-time spend visibility: Managers get visibility into employee spending as it happens. This enables better budget tracking and cost control.
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Accelerated reimbursements: Once approved, employee expense reimbursements can be processed and paid out quickly via Bill.com's integrated payments capabilities.
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Simplified auditing: Expense details and receipts are stored digitally for easy access and auditing. This simplifies financial reporting.
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Customizable workflows: Bill.com allows businesses to configure approval rules, expense policies, reimbursement terms, and other workflows to match their needs.
In summary, Bill.com provides a complete expense management solution to simplify the entire spend and reimbursement process for businesses. Key benefits include streamlining expense reporting, getting real-time visibility into costs, accelerating reimbursements, simplifying audits and reporting, and customizing workflows. This enables faster financial close and better spend control.
Configuring Bill.com for Optimal Expense Tracking
This section will cover how to configure expense tracking in Bill.com to meet your business finance needs. It will walk through creating custom categories, setting budgets, establishing approval workflows, and integrating connected accounting software.
Customizing Expense Categories for Detailed Tracking
Bill.com allows users to create customized categories and sub-categories for expenses based on their business needs for reporting. Setting up specific categories for areas like travel, office supplies, software, etc. enables more granular tracking and better visibility into spending.
To create custom categories:
- Navigate to Settings > Categories
- Click + Add Category
- Enter a category name and optional sub-categories
- Click Save
With detailed custom categories, businesses can run reports by type of expense. This helps enforce budgets and identify areas to control costs.
Implementing Budgets and Spend Limits for Cost Control
Bill.com provides several budgeting features to manage expenses:
- Set an overall budget by period
- Establish budgets by custom category
- Configure thresholds and alerts based on spend limits
- Require secondary approval when certain limits are exceeded
Enforcing budgets through Bill.com approval workflows enables organizations to:
- Maintain predictable cost control
- Increase accountability for expenses
- Curb unnecessary spending before it happens
Establishing Approval Workflows for Expense Management
Bill.com enables configurable rule-based approval routing for expenses and employee reimbursements. Businesses can:
- Route by department, location, employee level, or custom category
- Set different approval chains based on spend amount
- Require secondary approvals over certain limits
- Automate based on custom business logic
Customized automated approval workflows provide:
- Greater financial compliance
- Tighter expense management
- Enhanced accountability and spend visibility
With robust configuration options, Bill.com approval workflows facilitate strong oversight and control over all expenses and spending. This keeps budgets on track while allowing necessary costs.
Daily Financial Tracking of Spending in Bill.com
Bill.com provides powerful tools for tracking all business expenses on a daily basis. By centralizing spending from vendor bills, corporate cards, and employee reimbursements into one system, financial managers can gain clear visibility and control.
Automating Vendor Bills and Receipts Processing
- Bill.com automatically extracts key details from paper or digital bills using AI-powered OCR technology
- This eliminates tedious manual data entry of bills and speeds up processing
- Accuracy is improved by pulling information directly from source documents
Managing Corporate Credit Card Expenses
- Connect company credit card accounts to automatically import all purchase transactions
- Expenses are categorized and matched to departments for better visibility
- Customizable approval workflows distribute card charges to appropriate cost centers
Streamlining Employee Expense Reporting
- Employees submit expenses for reimbursement directly in Bill.com
- Attachments provide documentation to verify purchases
- Configurable approval chains enforce internal expense policies
- Once approved, reimbursements are automatically paid out to employees
By centralizing all spending flows into Bill.com, financial managers gain a daily pulse on expenses to inform better budget decisions. Automation and seamless integrations ensure accuracy, saving time and improving visibility.
Expense Reporting and Analysis in Bill.com
Bill.com provides real-time reporting and analytics on spending across multiple dimensions. This section will cover tracking expenses against budgets, visualizing spend by category, exporting data, and customizing reports for informed business finance decisions.
Utilizing Dashboards for Budgeting and Spending Insights
Administrators can monitor budgets versus actual spend by custom categories or time periods using Bill.com's dashboards. Alerts trigger for overages or exceptions.
- Bill.com dashboards display budgets, actuals, and variances at a glance, with drill-down capabilities
- Set budget alerts to be notified via email when spending exceeds defined thresholds
- Compare spend across previous years, quarters, or months to identify trends
Comprehensive Spend Analysis by Vendor and Category
Bill.com reporting allows businesses to analyze expenses by vendor, category, employee, or other dimensions. Charts visualize spend patterns and trends.
- Generate charts showing expenses by vendor, category, location, department, etc.
- Identify top vendors and categories by total spend over custom time periods
- Spot spending anomalies that exceed expected seasonal fluctuations
Customizing Financial Reports for Deeper Insights
Transaction data can be exported from Bill.com to Excel or integrated accounting systems for further reporting and analysis. Custom reports meet specific business needs.
- Flexible reporting options allow businesses to focus analysis on key data
- Export raw transaction details to Excel for additional pivot tables and charts
- Integrate expense data with accounting platforms like QuickBooks or NetSuite
- Create and save custom reports tailored to organizational requirements
With robust reporting and analytics, Bill.com provides actionable insights into corporate spending and empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions.
Conclusion: Mastering Expense Management with Bill.com
In summary, Bill.com provides businesses with essential visibility and control over spending through its expense tracking features. By configuring the platform to meet specific needs, organizations can enforce budgets, simplify accounting, and gain valuable insights into costs.
The key takeaways for effective spending control using Bill.com include:
- Real-time tracking of vendor bills, credit card expenditures, and employee expenses against granular budgets
- Customizable automation for streamlined expense management workflows
- Integration with leading accounting systems for consolidated financial reporting
Businesses interested in improved expense tracking can sign up for Bill.com's 30-day free trial to experience the key capabilities firsthand before committing.
It is also recommended to consult an accounting professional to determine the optimal Bill.com setup and workflows based on your organization's specific structure, needs, and existing financial systems. With the right configuration, Bill.com can become an indispensable tool for expense management.
