Travel and Expense
What Are The Biggest Expense Types to Expect?
Understanding the biggest business expenses is key to any organisation, particularly when looking to control costs or when planning a phase of growth. As you adapt and evolve, there’s no doubt that new expenses will arise. Managing them is easy with automation, but you need to be able to spot them first.
Automating your travel, expense and invoice processes will give you the visibility needed to identify outgoings and keep them under control before anything gets out of hand. Once you have insight into where spend is happening, you can oversee expenses effectively, reach business goals faster and make the business run better. To help you know where to start, we’ve come up with a few typical business expenses to be mindful of.
Don’t Let These Common Business Expenses Slip Out of View
Business expenses are far reaching across the organisation and some of the biggest can include:
- Travelling to see a client in person
- Mileage
- Train, bus and plane tickets
- Hotel rooms
- Equipping business workspace
- Automation tools
- Office rent
- Advanced technology
- Advertising your services
- Adverts in newspapers or magazines
- Adverts on radio, TV and in the cinema
- The cost of producing the creative
Travel expenses are incredibly common in business and make up somewhere between 8% and 12% of the average organisation’s total budget. As travelling picks up speed post-pandemic and becomes more frequent in your business, you can work with suppliers to negotiate special rates which will lead to cost savings in the future.
The business workspace encompasses many different types of expenses, from stationery to postage. Even utility bills and insurance policies are both claimable outgoings. It’s worth noting that some of these expenses qualify for VAT reclaim, so you won’t lose out on any potential profit.
Staying On Top of Expense Management
As you ramp up your sales strategy, build client relationships and scale the business, it might be worth considering implementing a travel and expense policy. If there is already one in place, focus on areas where compliance is failing, and expense claims are increasing. If starting from scratch, it’s important to remember to build a policy that aligns with your values, is clear and concise and covers all areas of the organisation.
Spend management solutions enable businesses to bring policies to life for all employees in a simple, smooth experience. With them, you are able to holistically implement controls and rules that make being compliant not just the right thing, but the easiest thing to do. By having full visibility over spend, businesses can easily stay on top of expense management and be confident and prepared for any future audits.
It's Not All About Business Expenses…
Business expenses are just one small cog in your organisation’s machine. With SAP Concur solutions, you can gain actionable insights from travel and invoice data that will make your business run better. And by having all your data in one place, spotting patterns across the business is easier than ever, meaning you can target suppliers for better discounts as well as detect and prevent fraudulent spend.
From managing supplier invoices to reporting mileage accurately, automation enables businesses to streamline their processes, improve employee satisfaction and retention and increase scalability.
Further Reading
- Read the answers to top spend management questions in this Frequently Asked Questions guide