Learn about the tools that help you run a smooth business, mitigate your stress levels, and gradually help you take your business to the next level. Since the era of digitalization of everything does not necessarily mean small businesses and entrepreneurs find it easy already, right? Well, this article has covered you with highly recommended financial tools that assist businesses in boosting profits and controlling spending. A study has found that companies investing in the right tech stack will likely experience a 3 times higher customer retention rate.
A report by Fundera showed that just 30% of new businesses survive, with 20% failing in their first year, nearly half failing in their first five years, and 70% failing at the end of the decade. Therefore, tools that help save time by replacing manual tasks such as reconciling charges, processing invoices, and matching receipts to expense reports are the need of the hour.
Understanding Financial Management Tools
Financial Management tools are essentially those that help system designs, software, and applications that assist in carrying out effective and effortless financial activities. Businesses and companies benefit from these tools for budgeting, investment analysis, expense tracking, financial planning, and overall financial decision-making. These financial tools include accounting software, financial dashboards, budgeting apps, and investment tracking tools.
There are several advantages a business can avail from these tools, and we have mentioned each in this article. These tools assist in spending control and boosting budgeting. They ensure accurate financial reporting that cuts the stress in half. Individuals and businesses are reported to make better investment decisions when using these tools. Furthermore, they bring time and cost efficiency, equally important factors for any business. Businesses also observe enhanced tax compliance when employing financial tools in their operational activities. One also gets vigilance on debt reduction and management. Therefore, these reasons alone reflect the significance of these financial tools that help businesses grow and sustain success in their respective fields.
10 Financial management tools that benefit businesses
1- Rippling:
An all-in-one platform, Rippling, is highly beneficial for departments like finance, IT, and HR by unifying them into a single system, significantly helping businesses save time and channel it to their workforce more efficiently. The tool is known for consolidating a business’ overall finances. From corporate cards to payrolls, benefits to expense management, the tool offers an updated overview of cash flow across your company and suggests professional takes on spending patterns. This tool lets you set hyper-custom policies based on the dollar amount and vendor, assisting businesses to block out policy expenses with expertise. You can also set automated workflows that eventually trigger an alert in case of a sudden rise in cost in any specific department. Well, doesn’t that make the work of three different run smoothly when unified? Yes, it does.
Highlight features:
- It curates detailed, structured approval workflows and specific spending policies.
- This high-end tool automatically handles tedious expense management tasks such as flagging duplicates, updating financial reports, and mismatched receipts.
- It helps simplify international expense reimbursements by automatically converting the expenses into local currencies.
- Used for managing, Issuing, and revoking corporate cards, ensuring personalized spending controls by identifying employee spending needs.
2- Expensify
If you are looking for software that streamlines expense tracking and reimbursement and is a user-friendly financial management tool, Expensify is your Go-To tool. It assists employees and administration by simplifying expense management and displaying features like receipt corporate card reconciliation, scanning, and customizable approval workflows.
Highlight features:
- It minimizes manual data entry by automatically scanning the receipts.
- It integrates with travel, HR, and accounting apps.
- This integrated invoice software calculates taxes, discounts, and fees.
- The app offers a global reimbursement feature for cross-border payments.
3- Ramp
It is an effective spend management software platform that assists in automating accounting workflows, issuing companies with corporate cards, and paying vendors. This app also proves advantageous in assisting employee spending policies and reconciling expenses.
- You will get unlimited physical and virtual corporate cards with spend controls and auto-enforced policies.
- Expense management is eased with features such as automated generation, receipt matching, and compliance checks.
- Avail cost-saving opportunities with AI-powered saving insights.
4- Brex
Businesses and companies use this tool to help streamline their spending with personalized automated receipt capture, expense policies, and accounting integrations. Furthermore, this platform is powered by AI that provides invoice scanning for vendor bills, corporate credit cards, and travel booking shortcuts.
Highlight Features:
- Enjoy AI-powered spend reviews backed with customized spend policies.
- With Brex’s credit cards, both virtual and physical, you can get seven times the returns on certain purchases.
- It also helps manage travel and expenses (T&E) and assists in budgeting and reservations.
- A business account is further provided with corporate credit cards and yields 4.89%.
5- SAP Concur
Businesses and companies can now control costs and monitor compliance with Concur’s cloud-based expense management platform. This tool has its expertise across invoices, travel, and expenses. It can be paired with accounting software like SAP’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution, QuickBooks, and NetSuite to enjoy maximum efficiency.
- Automated spending tracking with business cards, bookings for travels, and invoices.
- Comprehensive system integrations.
- Automation for accounts payable boosts efficiency and reduces non-compliant spending.
- Extensive reporting and analytics options for quick understanding of spending patterns.
6- Navan
This is a high-end expense management and travel solution tool. The tool is used for automated adjustable spend controls, expense categorization, and worldwide reimbursements across 45 countries and 25 currencies.
Highlight features:
- Saves time by reducing manual data entry with its automated conciliation feature.
- This tool lets you customize spend controls enforced at purchase, mitigating out-of-policy spending and fraud.
- It assists in boosting forecasting and curating analytics that identify flags for out-of-policy spending.
- It is a time-proven, effective platform for business travel management that aids in travel booking, offers 24/7 support, and offers exclusive deals.
7- Xero
Employing this accounting software provider for recordkeeping, reconciling transactions, and processing invoices can save businesses time and energy. The platform focuses on small enterprises and can interface with other business apps, access bank data from over 21,000 international financial institutions, and manage budgeting.
Highlight features:
- Automated reminders for invoices Flexible payment options.
- Workflows for inventory management that minimize manual tracking as well as assess performance.
- Accounting daily to verify transactions and maintain proper recordkeeping.
- Tools for job tracking that support budgeting, bidding, invoicing, and project planning.
8- QuickBooks
This software helps with a suite of financial management products, including time tracking across accounting and payroll. This tool has significantly assisted businesses, specifically small—to mid-sized ones, with managing bills, tax preparation, invoicing, tracking expenses, reporting, and more.
Highlight Features:
- It speeds up the process of vendor payments as it has smart invoice software.
- Offers services for managing expenses that automatically identify transactions, upload receipts, sync with all accounts, and account for deductions.
- Provides with experts who have experience in tax filings for specific plans.
9- FreshBooks
This is accounting software preferably used by small—to mid-sized businesses. It significantly offers invoicing features, double-entry bookkeeping tools, vendor bill pay, and expense tracking, which eventually help businesses balance their books.
Highlight Features:
- Generate customized invoices quickly and error-free.
- Features for managing expenses include budgeting tools, tax document creation, and mobile receipt scanning.
- Businesses can use their proposal templates to help clients understand a project’s scope, schedule, and deliverables.
- It offers accounting software that further simplifies it for companies to monitor loans, assets, and income and allocate transactions to the appropriate expense categories.
10- NetSuite
Did you know that Oracle NetSuite has assisted over 38,000 businesses in simplifying accounting processes, effortlessly allocating resources, and streamlining inventory tracking? This tool offers financial management services such as bookkeeping, expense tracking, and reporting.
Highlight Features:
- This tool guides businesses and companies in generating financial statements compliant with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)
- Invoicing software that simplifies the management of recurring subscriptions and supports various price types.
- This tool offers credit card matching, invoice-to-purchase order matching, and general ledger account reconciliation services.
- It also aids in managing expenses and assists staff in sending receipts for approval.
11—E-Commerce Dynamic:
PayPal offers a range of financial services for different companies, such as link-building agencies that depend on online invoices. PayPal is a trustworthy financial tool that many businesses have been choosing to employ lately.
12- Zoho Books
It is a reasonably priced choice for entrepreneurs and small business owners, and the reasons make sense. Zoho Books delivers cost-effective accounting, invoicing, and inventory control capabilities. Furthermore, to improve the financial process, it also incorporates several other Zoho apps to provide the customers with the best of their capacity.
5 Time-Proven Advantages of Financial Tools Reported by Multiple Business
Many obstacles a company or business faces, such as cash flow problems when executing strategic investments and more challenges, need professional guidance to counter digital marketing trends. Undoubtedly, you may be employing these digital tools in your financial toolbox; getting guidance from a knowledgeable advisor who can offer expert advice on handling these complications is equally significant. They help small business owners make well-informed decisions to maximize their operations and balance their financial affairs primarily because of their in-depth knowledge of these technologies. These two resources generally guarantee a small firm’s long-term prosperity and financial security.
So far, we have understood that these financial tools work magically, especially for executives, employees, and admins, as they save time and make better business decisions. Read along to learn more perks, as these tools have been offered to businesses and companies time and again.
Enhanced visibility: Many tools help monitor cash flow and links between spending buckets, including payroll, expense reimbursements, headcount planning, and bill payments.
Greater commitment: They also help teams enforce employee spending policies, prepare tax paperwork before audits, and follow bookkeeping guidelines.
Promote enthusiasm among workers: Businesses that reimburse staff members who use their money for business expenses and encourage team members to spend responsibly always win. Financial management technologies prevent slow-paced approval processes and administrative hassles.
Accurate forecasting and budgeting: To stay under set budgets and predict your company’s future requirements, finance systems can evaluate monthly spending, calculate statistics like the average cost per recruit, and report on other costs.
Cut manual labor and save time: Over half of their teams’ time is spent on administrative duties, as claimed by 44% of finance leaders. Streamlining manual procedures with financial management systems helps facilitate bookkeeping and expense control.
Suppose you are a financial industry newbie or plan to boost your company’s overall operations. In that case, we recommend you subscribe to these tools that align with your company’s requirements. Additionally, seeking professional guidance from experts will help you know more about the effective running of your business and the type of tool you must use.
