Travel & Expense Management Software Market to Grow Spurred by Mobile Workforce

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The pandemic underscored the importance of having reliable mobile workers. But even before the health crisis, the United States mobile workforce population has been growing. In 2020, analysts projected the number of mobile workers in the US to reach 93.5 million by 2024. If that happens, mobile workers could make up nearly 60% of the US workforce.

Industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and insurance are increasingly relying on mobile workers. From nurses to lawyers, pharmaceutical representatives, field service workers, and salespeople, enterprises need tools that can provide visibility into their mobile workforce for effective management.

Expense management software is one such solution. The software enables enterprises to automate and streamline manual expense reporting, approvals, and expense auditing and compliance. On the other hand, mobile workers can use expense management software to easily file reimbursements and complete expense reports.

For example, they can track their travel expenses during fieldwork or business trips. Since all expenses can be managed in one location, the app saves time and makes processes more efficient. Moreover, it can contribute to increasing productivity as workers have more time to focus on high-value tasks instead of doing administrative work.

AI to Simplify Expense Reporting and Auditing

In a recent industry report, analysts cited the mobile workforce as a key driver of the travel and expense management software market growth. As the mobile workforce grows, businesses across industries also need to adopt travel and expense management software to handle the increasing volume of expense reports submitted by their employees. With an expanding user base, analysts expect the market to reach $2.90 billion by 2026.

One of the sought-after benefits of travel and expense management software is the use of AI for auditing and compliance. Various AI-enabled software products perform these tasks, from time tracking to writing software leverage AI to automate and streamline tedious processes within an organization. For travel and expense software, AI makes it possible to simplify expense reporting and auditing even when receiving hundreds of reports. Companies can perform automated checks on budgets, expense rules, and policies. They can see audit trails and flag non-compliant departments or employees.

Moreover, AI capabilities in an expense management app can help reduce fraud. It can check the authenticity of the expense report submitted by an employee by analyzing suspicious expenses and eliminating manual interventions.

Meanwhile, mobile workers benefit from AI as it runs features that enable the fetching of digital receipts. It becomes easier to gather receipts from e-mails or online purchases and extract the relevant information from the receipt. Since AI handles data entry, mobile workers can save time and avoid errors from manually entering expense data.

Better Control Over Spending

Amid concerns about a looming recession, businesses are doing a lot of belt-tightening measures. Having better control over their spending becomes even more important to save on costs during an economic slowdown. This entails excellent expense management.

Features of travel and expense management software like spend control and analytics allow businesses to control their organizational spending effortlessly. Managers or business owners can create budget limits, enforce expense policies, and set up purchase approvals. This can make sure money is not wasted on unauthorized spending.

Meanwhile, mobile workers can use spend control features to monitor their expenses. Once rules and restrictions are defined, mobile workers know exactly how much they can use for travel expenses. They know which provisions are covered by the company and can be reimbursed.

Vendors also offer integration and APIs that can connect expense management software to other enterprise apps like accounting and ERP software. This allows CFOs and other stakeholders to get the financial insights they need for budget planning, expense management, payments, and even corporate credit card reconciliation. Since earnings may be negatively affected during a recession, leveraging the features of expense management software can have a significant impact on business survival.