Having an efficient financial engine running at the heart of all its operations ultimately determines how strong a company's bottom line is. Whilst primary financial functions like budgeting, controlling, restructuring costs and cash management have traditionally received attention, there are other areas donot often see the light of day. This happens mainly because of a lack of data points available to shed light on them. Exploring some of those neglected areas can be beneficial.

There are digitised solutions now that can replace conventional paper-based functions, and they have a proven track record of bringing in cost-savings for companies. Cloud technology is perhaps the cornerstone of digitisation, going just by the sheer impact it has had on businesses worldwide. While companies have harnessed the cloud to run entire work platforms off of it, thereby saving substantial costs, We’ve observed that many have neglected functions like employee benefits, vendor billing management and expense management. For decades now, these processes have depended on taking up man-hours, manual work on storage and verifications, and physical documentation, which are all resource-hungry methods lacking prudence and sometimes even common sense. These are unintuitive processes and ultimately a drain on any company’s financials.

The Present Situation

In 2015,Towers Watson published a report (2015 Asia Pacific Benefit Trends)showing that around 17 percent of Indian companies that participated in the survey didn’t have a proper evaluation of how much they spend on employee benefits. A startling fact considering their findings that 30 percent of Indian companies spend over 20 percent of their pay roll on employee benefits. To me, this finding reveals why a lot of companies keep away from offering employee benefits. They infer that the cost-benefit ratio is too far apart. But there is a in congruence here, because replacing a manually managed system with a digital one has some obvious advantages.

● Process efficiency.
● Less resources needed for managing the work.
● Reduced costs associated with manual work.
● Increase in accuracy of work.
● Better control and better tracking of things.

Why Digitise Employee Benefits

The conventional methods, which are still followed by many corporations are rife with resource hungry, sub optimal elements like tedious paper work, manual verifications, delays in tax calculations,lost documents among other worries.

By digitising the entire operation, a company could potentially save up to 90 percent of its overheads related to managing employee benefit.

Taking expense management to a digital realm lets companies not only manage their expenses, but also helps them understand their expenses, plan out budgets,and settle claims based on priority.

Nagarro, an organisation in Delhi recently moved its tax benefits to a digital platform, and the company which was originally spending 15-20 hours a month in managing and distributing meal vouchers, is now able to send meal vouchers to its workforce within seconds. Even the company’s employees have welcomed the new change, increasing the adoption rate of tax benefits.

Direct employees have also been very accepting of digital employee benefits. We’ve lowered our costs greatly by digitising a host of employee tax benefits in the last year. We have offices in several locations serving a large workforce. The one-click process that new digital platforms bring in has saved invaluable operation time too. We don’t have to deploy dedicated resources to get this done any more.

Employees take home more money every year, and it doesn’t cost organisations. In fact, it brings down overheads. Modern technology with an an old-fashioned win-win.

Automation of Vendor Payments & Billing:

Companies can also consider automating vendor management. Moving to a digital system of settling and recording claims can be cathartic for companies, especially SMEs. Challenging as it may be to find the right solution for every firm’s needs, such a solution can expedite work, can be scaled to exact requirements and make for more accurate results. The advantages are clear:

●Efficient use of resources.
●No costs of storage and logistics,.
●Better transparency in keeping records and data.
●Zero pilferage.

Essentially, this could be done through app and web portal based platforms that feed in all claims from various locations into one central hub for processing.The cost effectiveness of the system become plain to see.

Expense Management on Cloud

Managing cash flows reflects directly on a company’s profitability. Taking expense management to a digital realm lets companies not only manage their expenses, but also helps them understand their expenses, plan out budgets around that, and settle claims based on priority. Digital expense management can provide real-time insights into a company s cash flows and what the overall impact of that is.Bills can be thoroughly vetted before approvals are made. This prevents discrepancies and also discourages misconduct of any sort. The kicker at the end of all of these advantages is also that it does away with the need for paper work and manual data entry while making the process a lot more transparent for employees as well.

Its a constant battle for companies of all sizes to maintain an optimal cost of being in business. This means up grading their practices and putting in place measures that see them through changes. Technology brings creativity,innovation and ultimately savings. Its time to look at business functions and ask the question: how can we digitise for a better tomorrow?