1. What is a business expense?
2. Four Tips to Track Business Expenses
   1. Digitize all of your receipts
   2. Find software that organizes your expenses.
   3. Keep a separate card for your business expenses.
   4. Sync your bank account and your financial software.
3. Four Best Apps to Track Business Expenses

Tips & Apps to Track Business Expenses

Let’s just put it out there: every company has business expenses and every company struggles with finding the right method of tracking these expenses. The more you grow, the more business expenses you tally and the more complicated doing so will become. There are a variety of ways to alleviate the tangled, error-prone, time-consuming process of tracking your expenses. Below, we’ve put together some of our favorite tips and apps to help track expenses for small businesses.

But first, let’s talk about what a business expense actually is.

What is a business expense?

Though companies incur a variety of different expenses day-to-day, business expenses stand out from the pack. A business expense is any expense incurred that is both ordinary–a bill you pay on a regular schedule, etc.–and necessary to keep your business running. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Rent
• Insurance
• Maintenance on vehicles or machinery
• Costs related to shipping
• Advertising buys
• Inventory

Business expenses are known entities that usually differ only in small amounts from payment to payment. Using apps to track business expenses provides the ability for companies to see the bigger picture of their finances and strategize for the future accordingly.

Four Tips to Track Business Expenses

With everything that goes into keeping a business successful, finding time to track business expenses can be a challenge. Here are a few tips to help you do just that:

Digitize all of your receipts

Keeping track of business expenses means keeping track of your receipts. Paper receipts, though still popular in most industries, are not conducive to keeping track of your business-related expenses. To help combat this, businesses should create digital records of all of their physical receipts and keep these in a well-marked folder on a secure computer.

This can be done by using a variety of apps to track business expenses, but in the long run, companies should start exploring finance management platforms that provide invoice digitization as a part of a greater suite of features.
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Find software that organizes your expenses.

Keeping and digitizing receipts is one thing, organizing them in a way that’s beneficial to better understanding your finances is something altogether more complicated. For this reason, and many others, businesses can find plenty of options for software that helps to manage and analyze your expenses. Not only does this remove the time-consuming task, but it gives you a birds-eye view of your finances that can beneficial to financial planning and strategy.

Keep a separate card for your business expenses.

To make managing your business expenses even simpler, make all of your business-related payments using a dedicated credit card. This will save you time and eliminate stress as you won’t have to take the extra step of extricating your personal expenses from your business ones when it comes time to track and manage them.

Sync your bank account and your financial software.

Whatever financial software you’re using, it’s best to sync your business expense account to that software. Connecting to the two allows for automatic invoice ingestion so you’ll never mistakenly miss uploading an update and you won’t have to waste precious time going through the time-consuming process. Meaning, you’ll have more time to dedicate to running your business.

There are many ways to track your business expenses to better manage your cashflow but these are a good place to start.

Four Best Apps to Track Business Expenses

There are many apps to track business expenses, some better than others. To help guide you through the necessary process of deciding which is the best way to track business expenses we’ve put together a small guide to some of our favorites.

Zoho Expense

Great for small businesses and freelancers, Zoho provides users the a simple, but robust means to track, manage and analyze business expenses. Users can report expenses on the go with automatic expense reporting. There are direct deposit options for fast reimbursement as well as automatic credit and corporate card reconciliation. The program also offers 25 reports based on various aspects of your company’s spend.

Rydoo

Considered by many to be the best app to track business expenses globally, Rydoo supports the US dollar as well as the Euro and the British Pound. It features real-time expense tracking and management and automated expense approval.

Emburse Certify

Emburse Certify has a wide selection of features to help track expenses for small businesses. Amongst these is the ability to issue virtual cards for employees so there’s no need for reporting expenses and then waiting around for reimbursement. To ensure a lack of misuse in terms of business expenses, Emburse Certify offers streamlined approvals and built-in policy controls so employees can only spend within a certain limit.

QuickBooks Online

One of the big names in financial management, QuickBooks is a gold standard for software to track business expenses and so much more. You can sync your bank account and credit card so everything is automatically uploaded. That said, QuickBooks offers a full suite of financial management software and the cost is indicative of that. It’s best suited for larger businesses that need more functionality out of their financial software.

There’s no way around it: your business has expenses and keeping them organized is a crucial aspect of managing your finances. And though this can be a complicated process, there are best practices as well as software to track business expenses that can alleviate the stress of doing so.