Concur: How businesses can reign in overspending employees

For organisations with employees with bad spending habits, effective management and tracking tools could be the answer.

Concur says that if businesses want to curb employee spending habits and reign in extravagant or irresponsible employees, they must be able to track the spending.

Murray Warner, business development director, Concur comments, "businesses are looking to cut costs, so business leaders are looking at making sure employees don't overspend.

Warner says the key to smarter expense management is identifying those employees with spendthrift tendencies and helping them manage their expenses more effectively.

Concur suggests four ways businesses can better manage over spenders:

Once budgets are set and approved, everyone needs to stick to them. Business leaders should encourage teams to plan ahead and allow time to source the best suppliers for the job. This practice ensures business spend is being benchmarked and organisations are getting value for their money.

Unforeseen circumstances can easily result in overspend. When this happens, businesses should consider what the knock-on effect may be to the budget as a whole and take action. A proper evaluation can provide finance solutions to absorb the expense or provide details on where savings can be made elsewhere to balance the books.

Businesses should remove complexity from the invoice process to stop delays and late payments. Solutions that use purchase orders can help improve visibility into spend before it's done as well as provide transparency of organisational payment practices.

Employees should be made fully accountable for what they spend. Where overspend occurs, managers should ensure those responsible can justify their actions and, if necessary, educate them appropriately. Likewise, good practice should be rewarded and communicated to teams.

Warner concludes, "by identifying ornate employees, organisations can help them plan better, be more disciplined, and understand how their spending affects the business.

"Often, simply having more visibility can help people make better spending choices, saving the business money and reducing the amount of time managers have to spend dealing with out-of-policy expenditure.