Expense Management

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read): Expense Management: Your Path to Financial Finesse. Mobile Expense Management (MEM), Telecom Expense Management (TEM), and Technology Expense Management (TEM) empower businesses to optimize spending. MEM ensures mobile efficiency, TEM navigates the complex telecom landscape, and TEM dives into technology expenses. Together, they offer transparency, accountability, and precision, guiding businesses toward strategic growth and financial prowess in today's digital age.

Why don't money and time get along? Because saving one often means sacrificing the other.

Expense Management solutions inherently solve for this problem. They are a single-pane-of-glass tool that involves tracking, controlling, and optimizing expenses within an organization. Utilizing these solutions, effective expense management ensures that company funds are utilized efficiently, budget accountability, and optimized procurement through workflows and integrations. The value of these solutions include transparency, accountability, accuracy, and automation. Transparency provides businesses with a clear understanding of their expenses, enabling well-informed decision-making at the level of specific cost-centers or individual unit-metrics.  Accountability ensures that employees and departments are responsible for their spending, promoting fiscal discipline within the organization. Accuracy in recording and analyzing expenses is essential for financial reporting and strategic planning, while automation ensures all necessary platforms are tightly integrated and customized workflows are used to ensure a seamless process from procurement to accounts payable.

In the context of modern business applications, we can consolidate the expense management platforms into 3 classes depending on ingestible spend categories. All of these include single bill consolidation and payment as a great value-add. As you progress to the right in the explanations below, each platform includes the capabilites of the previous.

Most MEM providers have direct integrations with the mobile carrier billing platforms called eBonding. This allows for a more custom and dynamic solution considering larger enterprise customers have lower negotiated rates for data pools, devices, etc. The MEM solution can proactively monitor the data plans and make changes depending on the usage. For instance, if a customer subscribes to a 10GB plan for a device and they are on track to use 5GB, then the solution will downgrade to the 5GB plan for that month and then change back to the contracted rate the following month saving the company money. When using this across hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands devices then the aggregation of savings is very lucrative. If the solution continuously sees this usage as a pattern then it will recommend the downgrade permanently. On average, the MEM solutions are saving customers between 20-25% (or more) off their monthly mobile bills. They are also ensuring fees, taxes, and other line items are accurate and are relatively precise month over month with proactive notification and resolution if an anomaly is detected. 

Another value of a MEM is the integrations, inventory, and procurement features. Integrations with HR platforms, Accounting, ERP, etc automates the employee onboarding and off-boarding process to maximize efficiency through automation and minimize expenses around excessive purchasing, allowing for cost control. For example, a new employee is created in an HR platform, or identity platform like Active Directory, to start onboarding. This employee is generated a login to the MEM platform as part of the user portal with access to procure a device and plan. The device and plan are controlled by the employees job role and responsibilities, this is to ensure a company can control a lower level employee and C-Level have different buying power for device models and accessories. Once the selections are complete by the employee then supervision workflows can be used to provide an additional approval process for accountability, if the direct supervisor doesn’t respond, or is out, then failover workflows will automatically kick in to approve or deny. Assuming approval is complete then the order process sends the device and accessories to the MEM provider for staging and kitting and the bill gets sent to the accounting platform for accounts payable. Staging and kitting is part of the Managed Mobility Services(MMS) process and is explained here. Then, when the employee leaves, the MMS provider sends a box with a shipping label for ease of return and allocates the device to the company’s inventory once received and sanitized for reissue or recycling.

Telecom Expense Management, a.k.a. TEM, adds other telecom spend capabilities including landline phones, internet connectivity, and data services. There are less savings capabilities in the wireline category compared to MEM, but the primary value surrounds the fees and accuracy from bill to bill. Most providers can also negotiate rebates, continuously search cheaper options, and find other hidden savings that only industry experts are aware of. This piece is notably less sexy than the MEM.

Technology Expense Management, also TEM to add confusion, takes the traditional Telecom Expense Management and encompasses a broader spectrum, including software licenses, cloud services, hardware procurement, and IT-related subscriptions. Managing these technology expenses is crucial in the digital age, where technology plays a central role in business operations. Imagine a company with numerous tracking spreadsheets and someone asks the question “How much does a new employee or business objective like M&A, Development, etc cost?” TEM can do this with a few clicks of a button using canned reports or dashboards rather than requiring a significant time investment to complete the task. 

Mobile expense management, telecom, and technology expense management are closely related because they all involve leveraging technology solutions to streamline expense tracking and optimize costs. By adopting specialized software and tools, businesses can gain real-time insights into their mobile, telecom, and technology expenses. These insights empower organizations to make data-driven decisions, negotiate better deals with vendors, eliminate unnecessary expenses, and automate procurement tasks. Ultimately, integrating these specialized expense management practices enhances overall financial efficiency, enabling businesses to invest in strategic initiatives and achieve sustainable growth in today's competitive landscape.