How difficult can it be to manage your expenses?

Having seen how others prepare their expenses, I am amazed at the pain people go through, which prompted me to write these top 5 daft ways to manage your expenses:

1. Put them in an envelope for another day. LEAN practitioners would recognise the inefficiencies of this "batch & queue" system, and it's going to be painful when you finally get around to it.
2. Leave them for your account to sift through when he prepares your accounts. Convenient for you, but time-consuming for him and he'll charge you for the privilege.
3. Enter them in a spreadsheet. It sounds fine, but building-in cost analysis can be difficult and leaving it out often makes life difficult preparing VAT Returns and year end accounts.
4. Use a poorly designed "Corporate Finance Systems". They do exist and it's even worse over a VPN connection, but employees have little choice unless of course you're the CEO.
5. Fill out a Personal Expense Voucher by hand. And, yes, it still happens ... I'll say no more.

Whilst a certain amount of batching is required you need to find sensible periods. For example, keeping on top of expenses at the end of each day might work for some, but for others at the end of a trip might make more sense. It depends on you and the system you use. Two smarter ways to manage your expenses are;

1. If you are self-sufficient, use an online expenses database and enter your receipts each day. Its good LEAN practice and you'll never be faced with a mountain of receipts to process ever again. We use our WebOffice which has an expenses feature built-in, aligned to our purchase ledger.
2. If you just hate entering receipts then get a Virtual PA to process your expenses for you, preferably using an online tool so you too have web access when you need it, but if you're paying then it's your prerogative to choose whichever of the five methods above you prefer.

If you incur a lot of expenses then you should keep tabs on what you spend and how you spend it, to try and find ways of minimising your cost to the business and this is where VAs come into their own ... helping you to save money.

For more ways to help you save time, money and hassle Search This Blog or visit www.office-lifeline.co.uk