Why High-Performing Businesses Turn to Soldo for Smarter Spend Management Solutions

16 July 2021 | 6 Shares

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In any finance and accounting department, the monthly chore of tallying and reckoning employees’ expenses is charitably described as “mundane.” It’s real time drain, taking valuable hours that could be spent much more profitably.

For employees elsewhere in the organization, too, there’s also the wait for their out-of-pocket expenses to get reimbursed. That means what is effectively an impersonal financial reckoning can come laden with all sorts of complaints and annoyances. Lost receipts, claims for inappropriate expenses, and poor record-keeping all come to light in an atmosphere that can be a significant and costly inconvenience, not just for Finance.

No wonder that spend management is often the most dreaded task for the accounts team. However, it’s also a job that usually needs a manager’s oversight to make final decisions as to who is eligible for what, which cost centers should be charged, and a hundred other niggling details.

Many organizations are still using manual processes to gather in receipts, make reimbursements and balance the books — even when company credit cards have been given to staff. Part of any company’s growth comes from the oversight and strategic core that resides in the Finance Department. But if those personnel are in the weeds for hours every month, that transforms the finance function into a cost center, not a positive contributor.

Variable Spend Expenses

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In short, spend management in the form of petty cash, expenses, and company debit and credit cards is a considerable time and resource drain for most finance departments. These resources are usually in short supply as the business grows or moves into new markets.

Here’s where Soldo works wonders for finance managers and their under-staffed departments. It’s probably the only cost-effective and dedicated software platforms we’ve seen at Tech HQ dedicated to spend management. Soldo has been designed both to be suitable for smaller businesses yet also engineered so that as the company scales up, it’s perfectly at home at enterprise-scale.

By removing  significant burden, the business’s growth can be supported by Finance as the mainstay of any strategic plans. Here’s a quick guide to some of the features that make the platform pretty much unique in this space:

Like many finance department functions, managing spend at any significant scale is exacting work but usually comprises somewhat repetitious tasks — cross-referencing items claimed for against jobs or clients, deducting tax-adjusted amounts from budgets, and generally dotting I’s and crossing Ts. Unfortunately, the more repetitious the task, the more mistakes humans tend to make. Therefore, automating mundane tasks and letting technology crunch through figures makes sense on several levels.

With Soldo, organizations can get pre-paid debit cards (either plastic or “virtual” app-based cards), managers can provide approvals, and make certain transactions off limits — like those from gambling or alcohol vendors. Users get real-time feedback from their phone apps as to what they’ve spent, what on, and what remains, and can snap pictures of receipts and paperwork that are automatically filed against bought items.

These line items are captured from across the company, so helping manage spending in one place. The software is smart enough to handle digital advertising spending on Facebook or Google, to subscription payments for online magazines, research, HR training (like for software-as-a-service), and the automated systems can assign each item to an expense type and can be allocated towards a cost-center. For both line managers everywhere in the business and finance department staff, there’s real-time reporting and control: spending limits can be increased or curtailed in seconds, and every item accounted for.

Variable Spend Expenses

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As a company grows it will expand its outlays to encompass new advertising methods, fund activities and events that drive sales, and buy the apps, tools, and services that drive the expansion of the business. Surfacing critical insights like ROI on specific marketing exercises, for instance, becomes increasingly important as the organization grows. Therefore, it’s good to know that Soldo integrates with Xero and QuickBooks out of the box, and as a company grows, the same is true of Netsuite and Sage (coming shortly). For other integrations, show your IT people the comprehensive developer documentation that contains all the information they’ll need.

Soldo’s grasp of variable spending (around 20% of most businesses’ outgoings) scales perfectly from a couple of debit cards, right up to deployments of hundreds of virtual cards, expense accounts, cost-centers, multiple currencies, and full integration with other systems, such as RPA (robotic process automation) and job-tracking platforms. And as a fully cloud-native solution, issues like governance, data security, and financial integrity are taken care of as part of the service.

In our next article looking at Soldo, we’ll be considering the platform’s potential in more detail, so watch this space. If what you’ve read so far has piqued your interest, however, you can start with this 10-minute pre-recorded demo that will take you through the main points, then reach out to a local representative.