As a freelancer or small business owner, you might be ready to ditch the shoebox that has faithfully (albeit very haphazardly) kept your business expenditure receipts, and use an online tool. Opting for Avaza will enable you to bring your business processes onto a single platform like invoicing, payments, project management, time-tracking, team collaboration and yes, expense tracking. Warning: you are likely to experience the following ‘Aha!’ moments during this transition:-
1. Expense tracking doesn’t have to be such a pain!
2. Digitizing stuff is glorious for business!
Your business will benefit tremendously from the digital method of expense tracking. Avaza expenses allows you to categorize and organise your expense at the time of entry, which makes life much easier if you want to later on search or filter via a particular category for instance customer, project or type of expense.
3. Automated currency conversion!
The biggest headache of expense tracking often occurs on international projects: as if keeping track of cab charges, restaurant meals, train tickets etc. isn’t enough of a headache, now you have to factor in another currency. Avaza offers the ease of automatic currency conversion using the latest conversion rates when entering an expense.
4. The power of expense approvals!
With Avaza you can avail the power of expense approvals which is not on offer from many of the competitor tools out there. This means if a team lead desires, he/she can require staff to get approval for expenses. Approvals add visibility of team activities for management, and a chance to rectify issues in a timely manner. It also ensures more transparency and diligence by staff members. Avaza’s expense approvals features an elegant workflow with notifications and other user-friendly features – for details please refer to https://www.avaza.com/avaza-launches-user-friendly-expense-approvals/
5. Bring on the mark-ups!
Suppose you want to charge markups on business expenditures in order to get adequately compensated for your time and effort. Avaza offers you flexible options for this, whether you would like to use fixed-price or percentage-based markups (or both!) This can lead to new revenue opportunities with no administration overhead – win!
6. Invoicing becomes a breeze!
All this helps greatly when it’s time to bill clients: with a few clicks, all uninvoiced expenses can be added to an invoice, instead of a tedious manual process. This ensures that all your expenses are billed accurately and that there is no lost revenue. Avaza converts expenses in the base currency of the customer automatically when creating the invoice, making your life easier. Invoicing in this way goes a long way towards maintaining good customer-client communication; the customer is able to trace details of billed expenses on invoiced items, reducing the need for chase-up calls.
7. Insightful reports in a jiffy!
This is probably the best bit: you can keep tabs on your spending and review your expenses by various categories. How much was spent on which customer? How costly is a project/staff member? And across various projects how much are you spending on various business costs (Overhead and Utilities , Client entertainment, Office supplies, Travel expenditure etc.) All this info is available through a few clicks illustrated by colourful graphs and pie-charts.
8. Accounting and tax woes – sorted!
You don’t have to dread tax time as much now because all your receipts are in the cloud, easily searchable and linked to the relevant project/task/category for quick access. With all expenses documented, you are well-equipped to file a timely and accurate tax return. You can even allow access to your accountant to assign the appropriate tax codes for you. And should you be audited by the tax department for any expense, you will have all the necessary documentation online to back your claims.
All these features are crucial for you, the small business owner to feel confident, financially secure and in control of your expenditures, and hence your business (Aha!).
