Managing expenses, keeping them in check, and streamlining them is crucial to sustaining any business. However, many companies falter in this department, causing them financial struggles and hampering their growth.
Organizations with mobile sales teams frequently face issues managing their finances. This is because most of their sales expenses are not logged systematically, causing accounting nightmares and tax-filing disasters.
From the perspective of sales teams, filing several small claims daily for small expenses is a problem. Even if done weekly, accurately remembering all expenses is a challenge. Moreover, without proper tools to file complaints, it is a tiresome experience.
The problem is equally frustrating from accounting professionals’ perspectives since they had to follow up with employees repeatedly to get expenses filed. This leads to wastage of time and causes cash crunches while adding to employees’ frustration.
Although there are several financial management solutions in the market, most of them are focused on report generation and analysis. They often ignore important aspects such as expense filing, policy adherence, communication, and businesses’ conversion needs.
Moreover, employee expenses can be of various types, and bills received by them can be either paper-based or digital. Most modern expense management software fails to handle both paper and paperless/electronic receipts with equal ease.
Software firms have made numerous attempts at making financial management software more efficient and hassle-free. Still, only a few of them have got it right when it comes to convenience, control, and user-friendliness. Fyle is one such software that has gained praise and accolades for its easy expense filing functionalities, seamless integrations, and powerful expense management features.
Investing in Fyle can simplify financial processes and help organizations streamline their expenses in a few simple steps. This review will be focused on Fyle and would cover the following points:
So let’s get to know about Fyle and what makes it a pioneer financial management tool with the potential to transform how organizations handle their expenditures.
Introduction to Fyle
Fyle is a SaaS-based expense capturing and management tool that has been created to help teams track their business expenses. It has been specially created keeping in mind the needs of mobile sales teams. Such teams have to manually feed in their expenses to get reimbursed or get approvals for their sales trips beforehand.
It also considers sales managers and accounting professionals’ needs, making expense approval and organization easier and more efficient. Fyle provides role-based access that allows organizations to maintain their hierarchy while providing expense approvals. It allows sales professionals to submit their expenditures in the system and lets the admins (managers and accounts teams) view and approve them in real-time.
Fyle contains the following modules:
- Dashboard
- Expenses
- Reports
- Payments
- Policies
- Analytics
- MIS Reports
- Summary
- Employees
(The italicized modules are present for the admin side only)
One great thing about Fyle is that it comes with web-based and mobile applications, which provide easy integrations with many apps and email providers. This allows users to file expenses swiftly from multiple channels. It also supports multiple currencies and gives you the option to choose cost centers around the globe.
Since sales teams have to plan trips and get expenses approved, Fyle allows users to add their trip details, vehicle type, and destinations to receive reimbursements. It also facilitates users to get their expenses pre-approved and upload receipts in bulk.
Managers can issue advances, analyze expenditures by categories, analyze risks, and gain key operational insights. Additionally, Fyle allows organizations to customize policies, budgets, and approval levels according to departments and their functions. Thus, you gain complete control and overview of all employees and departments’ financial transactions from a single platform. What’s more, Fyle can detect duplicate entries into the system and thereby reduce human errors.
Impressed already? We haven’t discussed the best features yet.
Key Features of Fyle
Fyle comes with an impressive list of features to help organizations track and manage their finances. Let’s have a look at the best ones:
1. Effortless Expense Filing
Fyle integrates with platforms like Gmail, Outlook, Slack, and Whatsapp, enabling you to add your expense logs from anywhere with greater convenience. A dedicated extension for Google Chrome makes it easier for you to log your browser expenses. It uses machine learning(OCR) technology to scan paper receipts via cameras, ensuring that all bill types are easily accounted for and logged into the system properly.
You can tag expenses to a particular project using Fyle and submit entries through its smartphone, web applications, and emails. In case you are not using Gmail or Outlook, you can send your expense receipts to a unique Fyle email address for real-time expense filing too. Fyle captures audit trails from multiple sources and validates adherence to company policies in real-time.
Here is a short video on how to log expenses in Fyle in different ways.
2. Designed for Field Personnel
For field employees performing sales operations on the go, Fyle allows the addition of mileage, date of travel, destination, and stops. The admin can also preset the costing per mile to automate the reimbursement provided to sales personnel upon their trip requests. In case the cost centers are located in a different country, Fyle enables automatic conversion of amounts to home currency, simplifying the entire filing process.
In case users want to add all their vehicle mileages for a particular duration, Fyle provides them the option to upload mileages in bulk. It can also calculate the trip expenses automatically if the destination and start location are fed into the system. It supports several file formats and compiles all expenses together to create a monthly report, which can then be sent for managers’ approval.
If a user has to travel to the same destination and return to their starting point for a number of days, they have the option of choosing the ‘Round Trip’ option from the application. This automatically calculates the total mileage accordingly and reduces manual effort.
Fyle makes it easy to add expenditures per day or duplicate entries for recurrent trips to save time and just change the trip dates in the travel expense reports. These reports can also be automated to be sent for approval, either monthly or weekly. Users can view the status of each report and download it in PDF or Excel format.
3. Petty Cash & Trip Management
Sales teams may often need advances for their trips as they may need to book transportation in advance for their trips. Fyle, therefore, has provisions for such individuals to request an advance payment from their managers. They can either request for a single or bulk advance through the system from managers.
Users can also raise a trip request, wherein the organization books transport for their personnel upon approval. Users can specify their trip requirements from the system itself and choose the payment method to be used for transport booking.
4. Admin Functions
The Admin functionality of Fyle allows managers and accounting professionals to gain a holistic overview of organizational expenses through its dashboard. Multiple levels of filters (e.g. projects, categories, duration, etc.) can be used to get the required expense data and a personal list of filters can be saved by an admin for future use. Managers can use this section to file and approve their own expenses and check the matched and unmatched expenses for different departments.
If expenses for an individual or group are not reported on time, single or bulk reminders can be sent from the admin side to notify them about the same. In case a report is not filed properly, the admin can also file it on behalf of an employee through the system. Fyle also enables admins to export reports (in Excel, CSV, or Email) and apply filters to them.
The Admin function can also be used to add project viewing permissions to employees. Managers and finance personnel can use this section for approving or rejecting requests, processing normal and ACH payments, or asking for additional approvals from their superiors. Admins can also customize columns and add new ones before sending expense reports to clients.
5. Analytics & Risk Assessment
Fyle not only helps you log and monitor expenses within your organization, but it also allows you to analyze the expenditures made by each department, project, category, or business unit. You can gain detailed operational insights regarding where delays are happening and understand their reasons.
This module can also help you evaluate risks by showing which of your organizational policies are being misused, which rules are being flouted, and which of your employees are overspending at any given time. You can choose to analyze the data for a time period, location, or department, and can get actionable insights on business finances.
6. Policy Management
Fyle also allows you to formulate organizational and departmental expense filing policies using a few simple steps. As an admin, you can define conditions through the Policies module to suit your needs. You can use this module to create policies based on projects, locations, business units, age of expense logs, and much more.
You can also limit expenses, define travel ticket types, add additional properties, and choose the action to be taken in case of policy violations and the approver(s) for such actions. Additionally, you can set budgets for specific cost centers, projects, or departments through the module.
In addition to the above, Fyle allows you to choose a home currency and lets you use your company’s logo for branding through its settings menu. Moreover, it offers well-detailed expenses and MIS reports to make life much easier for sales and internal teams.
The Final Word
Fyle comes with a wide assortment of options that can make expense filing and reporting a piece of cake for employees. Additionally, it offers several features to monitor, streamline, process, and approve of them. It is a must-have product for all organizations aiming to have better control over their finances.
You can know more about Fyle from its website or its SoftwareSuggest Product Profile Page.
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