Total Expense Management For QuickBooks Online

Expense management is a critical function for small and medium-sized companies, especially as you scale your operation. The efficient management of day-to-day expenses not only helps maintain your business’s financial health but also provides accurate insights into cash flow, profitability, and budgeting.

QuickBooks Online (QBO) offers a solid platform for managing business expenses, but integrating with a pre-accounting solution like Envoice can take the process to the next level, streamlining workflows and automating otherwise tedious data entry tasks.

In this article we put forward a total expense management solution using both QBO and Envoice. This marriage of an already powerful accounting software (QBO) and a technologically advanced pre-accounting tool (Envoice) is the perfect union to improve, manage, and scale your expense management function.

Understanding QuickBooks Online’s Expense Management Features

QuickBooks Online is one of the world’s most popular expense tracking software for small and medium-sized businesses, thanks to its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features. Combined with QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise and Online Advanced, QuickBooks is now serving more than 200,000 customers in the mid-market. Here’s how it handles expense management:

Expense tracking and categorization

QBO simplifies the process of capturing, categorizing, and tracking expenses. Business owners (or bookkeepers) can record expenses, specifying the purpose of the transactions, and these expenses can be linked to specific customers or projects for more detailed tracking.

Businesses that handle hundreds of transactions and expense reports daily, find manual data entry a time-consuming and expensive process. This is where QBOs latest accounting automation feature gives your business a real boost. It provides the ability for you to scan bills, and receipts into the system, while it categorizes the information. If you don’t like the category it has chosen, you are able to change this before approval, or create a rule to help the AI technology do things better next time.

However, the technology is new and there is room for data extraction improvement. A human verifier will still need to check the accuracy of the information, but it does greatly reduce manual data entry.

Bank and credit card integration

To automate the process further, QBO allows users to connect bank accounts and credit cards directly to the platform. This feature is invaluable for automatically importing transactions and matching them to existing expense records.

Once connected, QBO retrieves transaction data daily, reducing the need for manual entries. The system is also capable of doing corporate card reconciliation which is a huge plus due to the number of transactions recorded. Traditionally, expense management apps needed some kind of push, such as importing excel spreadsheets to manage transactions, but bank connection eliminates the need for this.

The system does provide the ability to create custom rules that automatically categorize a business expense based on the nature of the expense (e.g., categorize all fuel purchases under ‘transportation’). The ability to automate categorization and the ability to manage it manually accelerates the reconciliation process.

This is a step-up from how things used to be, but as your business grows, any manual intervention will cause a bottleneck, limiting your ability to get critical financial information quickly. Envoice is the answer to this gap in the process, and we will discuss why that is so shortly.

Receipt and bill capture

QBO offers a mobile app that allows users to take images or receipts or bills and automatically attach them to billable expense entries. This feature is very useful for sales staff, technical staff, and field staff who need to submit travel expenses and other business-related expenses.

While this helps reduce paperwork and speeds up the reimbursement process, you need to be subscribed to QBOs larger plans for this functionality. Also, there will be limitations to what this technology can offer with industries that generate a large volume of receipts such as retail or hospitality.

Expense reporting

QBO provides customizable expense reports, allowing business owners and managers to filter expenses by category, customer, or project. These reports can be generated in just a few clicks, giving you real-time insights into your billable expenses.

Although QBO reporting capabilities are robust, they are limited by the data that is imported into the system. For QuickBooks customers with complex expense structures, it may be challenging to gain comprehensive insights without investing time in customizing and verifying these reports.

How to eliminate repetitive bookkeeping tasks?

Book a demo

and we will show you how

Vendor payments and recurring expenses

QBO allows users to track vendor bills, purchase orders, and schedule payments. You can also set up recurring expenses ensuring that these costs are recorded on a consistent basis. You can load other businesses as vendors, and make payments directly from QBO if you are set up to do this.

This is just a snapshot of QBO features and they’re impressive. So why the need for a third-party integration like Envoice? QBO’s built-in automation is limited, especially in it lower subscription tiers. Without additional functionality, such as workflow automation and multi-level approval processes, you may still face inefficiencies that cost you time and money.

How Envoice enhances QBOs expense management cycle

While QBO is an excellent tool for expense management, integrating it with Envoice brings automation and efficiency into sharper focus. Envoice focuses on automating the data capture, making it an excellent pre-accounting tool. It also processes documentation, accurately categorizes information with ExactExtract, and manages approvals workflows. This significantly reduces manual effort in every part of the expense management cycle.

Furthermore, Envoice offers a human-in-the-loop verification system at a minimal extra cost. This takes the manual verification completely out of your everyday task list. Here’s how Envoice completes the expense management cycle for small and medium-sized businesses.

1. Automated receipt and bill capture with SmartExtract

Envoice offers SmartExtract Technology which automatically processes receipts and bills with a high degree of accuracy (99.9% with human-in-the-loop verification). It can extract key data such as amounts, tax rates, and vendor details. For companies with a large amount of transactions this is a significant time saver, and reduces the risk of human errors and fraud.

In short, QBO does it well. Envoice does it better and faster.

2. Workflow approval automation

QBOs higher tier plans include some workflow automation for approvals, but for lower tiers this feature is not available. Envoice, however, offers customizable multi-level approval workflows on its business plan (costing $14 a month). For businesses with many transactions and multiple approvers, this feature brings a level of oversight and control that complex operational structures need.

Envoice will automatically route approvals to the correct approvers, and send follow up messages to ensure there are no bottlenecks in the process. All work is approved in the system and the finalized work is then processed and sent to QBO. Forget paper approvals, forget bottlenecks, forget miscommunication, forget fraudulent approvals. Envoice ensures all of these business risks are mitigated.

This is the strongest feature that Envoice brings to the table, and similar capability in other software would cost your business much more.

3. Seamless integration and synchronization

Once integrated, Envoice syncs with QBO automatically, ensuring that all expenses captured in Envoice flow into QBO in real-time. This seamless integration minimizes the need for manual data transfer and ensures that QBO’s financial reports are always up to date.

QBO and Envoice working together for total expense management

While QBO is an excellent tool for expense management, integrating it with Envoice brings the expense management cycle to completion. Whether your goal is to reduce manual data entry, improve compliance, reduce human error, or streamline workflow approvals, this integration of two powerful accounting systems will help you save time and resources, allowing you to focus on growing your business.

ENVOICE 14-DAY FREE TRIAL