Budget Management System

What is Budget Management System?
Software to manage the expense claim, authorization, audit and repayment processes can be obtained from organisations that provide a licensed software, implementation and support service, or alternatively, from software as a service (SaaS) providers. SaaS providers offer on-demand web-based applications managed by a third party to improve the productivity of expense management.

Budget Management System Challenges
Do you know the top spending categories in the travel expense accounts? How about the average amount an employee pays for food every day during a business trip? If you lack visibility into this data, you face major hurdles during an auditing and optimization process. Your current system may be insufficient to display the data in useful forms. For example, if you can only view a limited set of reports, you may miss out on important insights. Information from other databases may shed additional light onto particularly tricky situations, but only if you have a way to pull this data into your accounting system. For example, you may see unusual purchases in an employee's report. If your expense system could integrate with other applications, you would see that the employee had to go to an urgent care clinic and pick up antibiotics for a sudden illness.

Budget Management System Attempts
High performance organizations improve profitability and shareholder value through innovation and creating a leading-edge culture that engenders personal responsibility and builds strategic value. The same holds true in expense management. Each individual makes decisions that incur expenses in an organization and thus each individual is personally responsible for creating value. While control procedures, authorization levels and budget variance reports are important, they cannot replace a culture of expense management where individuals are focused on cost efficiency rather than just being under budget.

Budget Management System Solutions
Finally, expense management success relies on actively engaging and rewarding employees to innovate and go beyond day-to-day routines. Consequently, successful organizations create a human performance system of processes and rewards that engenders a focus on expense management. While some organizations may attempt to implement the process surmising that “it’s the employee’s job”, strategic thought leaders understand that a system of goals and rewards will achieve much greater success. How many organizations provide rewards to employees for minimizing costs, creating new cost efficient processes or developing new and efficient techniques? Few, if any. Thus, employees typically live within the budget and enterprise performance suffers. Consider implementing performance-driving, high visibility incentives including financial rewards, personal recognition and achievement awards which will drive an expense management culture and eliminate fear of retribution or job stability. In many cases, it is the employees on the front lines that have a keen understanding of inefficient processes and methods to reduce or eliminate expenses.

Budget Management System Usefulness
Expense management is not just another business philosophy, fad or non value-added endeavor that increases complexity and wastes precious time. Rather, structured correctly from the onset, the process can be accomplished effectively and efficiently and as vast or limited as desired. The important point to remember is that in this time of global competition, increasing costs, and limited resources expense management is not only critical to reduce costs and thus increase shareholder value but is vital to the very long-term sustainability of the organization.