Expense Management Overview
Expense Management is a streamlined, automated receipt management solution designed to simplify expense tracking and accelerate month-end reconciliation. With seamless integrations to Xero and QuickBooks Online, businesses can reconcile expenses up to 10x faster—without the hassle of chasing employees for receipts and purchase details.
How Expense Management Helps Your Business
Tracking expenses every month can be time-consuming, especially as your business grows and spending is spread across multiple cards, employees, projects, and expense categories. Relay simplifies this process by automatically collecting receipts and purchase details from employees, significantly reducing the manual effort required for reconciliation. With accurate records syncing directly to QuickBooks Online and Xero, business owners and accountants can efficiently categorize expenses across key spending categories like Marketing, Office Supplies, and COGS.
Accurate record-keeping helps businesses identify cost-cutting opportunities, manage cash flow effectively, and stay prepared for IRS audits. Instead of spending hours deciphering transactions with cryptic merchant names, Relay ensures that receipts and purchase details are attached to each expense, eliminating the need for manual investigation.
How can this help you?
For business owners, Relay removes the burden of chasing employees for receipts while providing complete visibility into company spending. By reducing back-and-forth communication with accountants, business owners can maintain accurate financial records effortlessly.
Employees benefit from a hassle-free process where they no longer need to submit expense reports or use personal credit cards for business expenses. Relay ensures that all transactions are recorded correctly, and employees receive timely reminders to upload receipts using the mobile app.
For accountants and bookkeepers, Relay minimizes time spent requesting missing receipts and purchase details from clients. With faster reconciliation, accountants can focus on providing value-added advisory services, such as cash flow analysis, making them indispensable partners to their clients.
How Relay’s Expense Management feature can help you keep track of expenses
Administrators can set a documentation policy, enforcing team members with Manager and Cardholder permissions to upload receipts to Relay, where they can be stored and attached to debit card transactions for safekeeping/easy access when the receipt is needed for record-keeping, audit, or refund purposes.
Relay will notify cardholders—via SMS—that a card purchase requires a receipt. They’ll also see which transactions are missing a receipt in-app. Administrators will be able to see which transactions are missing receipts so they nudge Cardholders as needed.
Team members can also forward a receipt by email to Relay. Administrators, Managers, and Cardholders can directly upload/drag and drop receipts into the web or mobile app.
We’ll automatically attach a receipt to the corresponding transaction, saving the business owner or their advisor the grunt work of finding and matching transactions to receipts. In cases where we’re unable to match a receipt, Relay speeds up the process by only surfacing unmatched receipts and transactions.
Key features & important details
Relay’s integration with Xero and QuickBooks Online is separate from the bank feed and bill pay integrations, requiring an independent setup for receipt syncing and accounting field imports. The two-way integration imports expense categories, vendor details, and tax codes to ensure transactions are categorized accurately before syncing as expenses. Employees receive automated reminders to submit receipts and can upload them in bulk via the Relay mobile app. Businesses can also split receipts into multiple expenses for precise categorization and set up automated accounting rules for hands-free expense management.
For more information, please see:
- Sending Cardholder nudges for missing receipts for Expense Management
- Expense Management documentation notifications for Cardholders
To enable receipt management, advisors need administrator or super administrator access to set up policies and integrations, while team members require administrator access. Additionally, Xero requires an extra subscription for its Expenses feature, whereas QuickBooks Online does not. You can use Relay's Expense Management feature without syncing with Xero or QuickBooks Online.
Relay’s Expense Management solution eliminates the stress of tracking expenses, providing businesses, employees, and accountants with the tools they need for accurate and efficient financial management.