Zeni Expense Tracking Software
Managing business expenses doesn’t have to be time-consuming or stressful. With advanced AI automation and expert financial guidance, you can eliminate manual tracking, reduce errors, and focus on strategic decisions that drive growth.
Here’s a breakdown of Zeni’s features that make expense tracking effortless and efficient.
AI Expense Categorization
Accounting software has been able to categorize expenses automatically for years, but traditional tools do little more than sort them based on the merchant tag. Through optical character recognition and AI GPT technology, Zeni does much more.
For example, some of its most notable capabilities include:
- Recognizing and merging duplicate vendors to create cleaner financial statements
- Categorizing and reconciling expense data from invoices, receipts, and account statements
- Automating journal entries to ensure accuracy and comply with GAAP regulations
In addition, Zeni’s AI becomes more proficient at understanding the proper expense category over time through machine learning. It studies historical transactions and spending patterns and then applies the lessons it learns to future activities.
AI Financial Insights
In addition to tracking expenses, Zeni translates your financial data into a complete set of user-friendly financial statements, including the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement.
Not only do the statements help you make better informed strategic decisions, but you can also share them with lenders and investors to help you raise capital.
Additionally, Zeni can supplement your analytic capabilities. Its AI automatically studies your data and offers meaningful insights.
For example, it can identify trends in your performance, project expenses, and outcomes, and recommend specific courses of action.
AI Bill Pay
Zeni also helps streamline your expense management process on the payment front. With the power of AI, you can automate significant portions of the accounts payable (AP) process. For example, here are some of Zeni’s most helpful AP features:
- Invoice processing: When you upload a physical or digital invoice to Zeni, it auto-fills the information and stores the vendor details for future reference. You can also have it follow a custom expense approval flow, so invoices automatically go to the right parties in accordance with your expense policy.
- Free vendor payments: Many bill spend platforms charge expensive transaction fees, but it shouldn’t cost you extra to send money to vendors. Fortunately, you can use Zeni to make vendor payments directly from your platform for no additional cost.
- Real-time expense reports: Zeni bill pay shows you the status of your bills, payment history, and cash flow trends in real time. Access these expense report features directly from your dashboard, eliminating the need to hop between platforms.
Not only do Zeni’s AI bill pay features increase efficiency and cut costs, but they also limit your exposure to human error. By eliminating manual data entry, you can significantly improve the accuracy of your financial records.
AI Reimbursements
Manual employee reimbursements can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of an expense management system. Without expense reporting software and receipt apps, business expense tracking and approval is often tedious, expensive, and error-prone.
Fortunately, Zeni’s AI expense tracker app and reimbursement tool can significantly streamline the process while increasing accuracy. Here’s how reimbursements for employee spending works when you let Zeni handle them:
- Employees track expenses using the Zeni expense tracking app or software
- Employees submit expenses through the mobile app or software with receipt capture
- AI scans each expense receipt to auto-populate employee expense information
- Each expense claim automatically follows a customized approval process
- Employees receive their reimbursement payments with same-day ACH payouts
Like Zeni’s AI bill pay, its employee reimbursement features are completely free. In addition, you and your employees can access them right from the Zeni dashboard.
Other Zeni FinOps Services
Juggling financial tools and service providers can cause significant inefficiencies in your financial project management. Fortunately, Zeni is a one-stop shop for your startup’s needs.
In addition to expense tracking, we offer all of the following products and services:
- Payroll services: Let us run all of your payroll processes and make sure you’re always in compliance, including employee onboarding, ongoing management, and termination.
- Fractional CFO services: Get guidance from an expert CFO without the cost of such an experienced full-time employee. They can help you navigate complex challenges, such as fundraising or an M&A transaction.
- Business checking account: Keep your cash reserves in a business bank account that lets you earn up to 4.05% APY on your balances and provides $3M in FDIC insurance coverage.
- Business credit card: Open a business credit card that syncs to your Zeni account and earns 1.75% cash back with no hidden or monthly fees.
Meet all your financial needs under one roof with Zeni's unified platform and consulting services to streamline your processes and save resources.
Benefits of expense tracking software
Expense tracking software has many advantages over manual bookkeeping practices and can significantly improve your financial management systems. Here are some of the primary benefits you can expect:
- Time savings and increased efficiency: Expense tracking software automates many time-consuming tasks associated with traditional bookkeeping, such as expense categorization and financial statement generation. That allows you to focus on more impactful activities like strategic planning.
- Decreased risk of costly mistakes: Manual expense tracking is vulnerable to human error, such as mistyping numbers and miscategorized transactions. Expense tracking software can automate data entry and validation, which saves you from spending resources on identifying and correcting mistakes.
- Enhanced financial insight and analysis: Expense tracking software massively increases your ability to organize and analyze financial information. That can help you make better-informed business decisions, which is invaluable. Some advanced tools can even analyze your data and make recommendations for you.
Virtually all expense tracking software is superior to manual bookkeeping, but Zeni’s benefits are even more significant due to the host of features and services integrated into the platform.
The more you can consolidate with Zeni, the more efficient your systems can become.
Features to look for in expense tracking software
Not all expense tracking software solutions are created equal. Here are some features you should look for in them to help maximize the benefits to your business:
- Expense management automation: Your expense management software should be able to automate as many time-consuming tasks as possible, saving you resources and increasing the accuracy of your expense reporting process.
- Integrated payment processing: Look for software that facilitates payment processes, such as invoicing, vendor payment, and expense reimbursement. Not only does that help streamline these critical functions, but it also helps ensure your financial records stay up-to-date.
- Real-time financial dashboards and reports: The ability to inform your business decisions with data is one of the most significant benefits of expense tracking software. Look for solutions that facilitate your preferred types of analysis, such as KPI tracking or variance analysis.
In addition to the features included in a potential expense tracking software, consider factors like pricing, customer support, and the provider’s reputation. For more sophisticated tools, it may also be worth requesting a product demonstration.
If you’d like to see the many ways Zeni can help your startup with managing expenses, schedule a demo today.
When to get expense tracking software
When you get expense tracking software can impact your business just as much as which one you get. Since manual processes tend to be less efficient and effective, sooner is generally better, but here are some specific signs it’s time to make the switch:
- Manual tracking issues increase: If tracking your expenses with manual tools like spreadsheets is slowing down your financial reporting or causing you to make frequent mistakes, it’s probably time to switch. This often happens as your transaction volume grows.
- Accrual accounting is required: The cash basis of accounting lets you record expenses when cash changes hands, but GAAP-compliant accrual accounting requires you to record them when they’re incurred. It’s significantly more complicated, and expense tracking software is invaluable for implementation.
- Complex financial challenges arise: The more your startup grows in size and complexity, the more you’ll need insight into your finances to make informed business decisions. Expense tracking software significantly enhances your analytical capabilities and becomes essential past a certain point.
Ultimately, it’s almost never too early to invest in expense tracking software as a startup founder. Manual expense tracking is usually only practical for the smallest and simplest businesses. Waiting too long to acquire it is a much more common issue.
If you could benefit from expense management for startups, try Zeni. Our platform uses AI to enhance its automation capabilities significantly, and our dedicated accounting experts are always available to provide additional support.Schedule a demo today to see Zeni in action.
