How To Improve Your Startup With Expense & Asset Tracking

The importance of maintaining a budget for a startup is rather obvious, but many companies stop at installing basic accounting and financial planning software. Tracking solutions that help you keep an eye on your assets and expenses, however, are no less important. This type of software will allow you to retain more control of your business as well as to reduce the risk of big losses due to human error or outright malicious intent.

Businesses lose over 5% of revenue every year due to fraud, and theft from their own employees. Using a few tracking solutions will help you to avoid this, or at least to minimize your losses because you’ll be able to catch on quickly to what is going on in your company

Asset Tracking: How To Do It Right

First of all, you need to understand how all-encompassing asset tracking is. Tracking your assets means tracking every single item that has value to your business. This means that it goes beyond simply tracking your products through an inventory.

Tracking your assets effectively allows you to:

• Understand where all of your assets are at any given time to enable better business decisions.
• Optimize and improve your logistics.
• Provide insurance and financing providers with your detailed inventory at a moment’s notice.
• Improve your asset management and increase the accuracy of your financial statements.

Asset tracking is most often used in warehousing and logistics. The solutions you should use for these purposes are GPS trackers and barcodes or RFID tracking.

However, it is not only retailers, manufacturers, and delivery services that can benefit from asset tracking solutions. IT businesses can use them to maintain and manage hardware inventory. Healthcare startups will also benefit from this tech as it allows for more efficient management of supplies and can boost your business productivity, therefore giving you a competitive advantage.

Automated asset tracking also reduces the risks of theft, which can literally save your business because about 30% of companies faced with employee fraud never recover fully. Managing your assets is as important for startup survival as managing your cash flow, so be sure to use the best solutions you can afford and to upgrade them constantly.

How To Do Effective Expense Tracking For Startups

Expense tracking is even more important for startups because these businesses grow rapidly. In fact, quite often they grow too much too fast. Scaling up too early is one of the most common reasons for startup failure and efficient expense tracking can help keep you from doing it by providing a detailed breakdown of how much money you are actually spending.

With this information, you will be able to estimate your prospects better and therefore not make decisions that you are likely to regret.

Expense tracking solutions help startups to:

• Save time by increasing overall efficiency and ease of management.
• Improve control of finances, reducing the risk of cashflow problems.
• Decide on the right time for scaling up.
• Manage growth-related changes more efficiently.

As startups often use a variety of methods to make and receive payments, the expense tracking solutions you use must take account of this. Therefore, use software which will help keep records of cash payments, receipts, and online money transfers.

It is worth bearing in mind that while receipts, invoices, and digital payments can be tracked easily, cash payments offer a lot of room for both human error and fraud. As they cannot be tracked automatically, you need to establish strict protocols for all your employees who are handling cash on the company’s behalf. Providing specialized training and instilling accountability are essential steps for all startups.

As many startups today have their employees traveling, you will also need to install travel expense tracking solutions. This is another aspect of startup budget management which often doesn’t receive enough attention from the business owner, which means you might be losing money without even knowing it.

Today there are many solutions to allow you to track expenses carefully, and which can integrate with other types of software used by startups. The most popular amongst them are Expensify, Mileage Log+, Shoeboxed, and Smart Receipts. Start by trying out free options to see which works best for your business.

Startup Expense & Asset Tracking: Final Thoughts

Getting your startup off the ground is extremely hard because there are hundreds of tasks that require your attention and not enough hours in a day to complete them all. Because of this stress, some important things can slip your attention, which can result in huge losses for your business.

Asset and expense tracking solutions can help you reduce this risk and save you time due to their efficiency. Be sure to add these solutions to the list of tech tools that make an entrepreneur’s life easier.

If your startup’s budget is extremely limited, you can find free versions of many solutions. They might typically be limited in functionality, but they will help you to get started and tide you over until you have an opportunity to level up.

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