Managing Corporate Spending: A Guide for Scaling Businesses

Expanding a business means reviewing your spending very carefully. Fail to do this, and you could end up multiplying poor spending habits, and hobbling your business in the long term. For corporate business, expenses should be a particular area of concern. Where executives and other travelling staff are granted unchecked spending privileges, they’ll tend to spend recklessly. But how can you stay on top of this problem in a way that’s cost-effective, and that doesn’t generate resentment and stress?

Modern technology provides us with a few interesting possibilities. 

Implementing a Scalable Expense Tracking System

A good expense tracking system should be capable of expanding and contracting to suit the needs of the business. In some cases, this expansion and contraction might occur over the space of a given year. You might have a busy period during Christmas, and then a slowdown in the following spring.

When human administrators are dealing with your expenses, you might find it difficult to downsize in response to this changing demand. This leads to inefficiency. Thus, an effective expense-tracking system will need to be highly automated. A good software package will be able to deal with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of transactions over the space of a given day. It should provide a transparent, accessible way to oversee spending.

Leveraging Prepaid Business Cards for Better Financial Control

One straightforward way to keep spending under control is to issue travelling employees with prepaid business cards. When employees understand that they only have a certain amount to spend on a given day, they’re likelier to be frugal. Extra money can always be released for emergency situations. 

Prepaid cards have another key advantage: they allow for the nature of every item of spending to be recorded, alongside the amount. This allows the activities of employees to be more closely scrutinised. 

Monitoring Spending Patterns for Budget Optimization

As the business grows, there may be opportunities to tweak your spending. For example, you might look into bulk discounts when you’re sending a whole team of executives to visit a particular city for a conference. These opportunities might not always be obvious – so it’s a good idea to seek feedback and advice from the people who will actually be doing the spending. 

Planning for Financial Health in a Growing Business

Cash flow should be a primary concern for an expanding business. If you don’t have a suitably generous ‘buffer’ of cash available, then you might find yourself unable to deal with short-term emergencies and unexpected problems. Look at driving down your overheads, and taking financial forecasting seriously. If you know that there’s going to be a seasonal change in your takings, or that world events are going to have a particularly large effect on your operations, then it makes sense to plan for your problems early on.