Chrome River CURRENTS

Cutting costs — and keeping them in check — is an ongoing and essential job. But, as anyone tasked with managing a budget can attest, it only goes so far. At some point, you simply need to bring in more money.

Need socks, groceries and pet food? Sure, that’s fine. Feel the need to buy some new golf clubs or maybe a teepee? Hey, that’s your concern. Want to gamble on the lottery — or a cosmetic surgery procedure? It’s no big deal until you try to slip them past your employer as expense claims.

When your organization is growing quickly, you need to fuel that expansion with cash. You could try to borrow the money, but a better option might be to focus on speeding up your cash conversion cycle, according to a recent article on the CNNMoney website. 

Many organizations are discovering that cloud computing offers a number of strategic opportunities to cut costs and boost revenue. Business Finance magazine explores the ways leading organizations are using the cloud to become more competitive, from improving decision-making to transforming collaboration and business processes.

States and municipalities often use tax incentives to attract different industries, and capturing these incentives plays an important role in cost control. But many organizations risk missing out on these tax credits due to poor internal communication. Using an expense software suite can help your organization comply with tax regulations and collaborate to secure tax credits.

If you’re unsure about whether you can write off a business travel expense, you might find it prudent to err on the side of caution — especially if the charge is negligible. Still, it’s hard for you and your organization to remain competitive if you routinely leave money on the table in the form of unclaimed deductions and unreimbursed expenses.

Finally home after a long business trip, the field representative feels worn out. Unreliable transportation, bare-bones lodging and stingy per diems certainly didn’t help. The rep heaves a sigh, pulls out a wad of crumpled receipts and scrawled notes and starts preparing reports — in triplicate, per the expense report program’s requirements.

What if someone told you that about 5 percent of your organization’s revenue was being lost to fraud? It’s worth considering, because that’s the average loss for an organization, according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. Most of that revenue slips away through fraudulent expense claims, payments and procurement.

New studies predict increased business travel in 2014, according to NBCNews.com. With these changes on the horizon, tools for travel expense management will be more important than ever. Additional travel is likely to generate more data and paperwork for travel managers, unless a streamlined, automated system can be implemented.

What if your organization could cut business travel expenses in half just by implementing expense management software? That’s what a new survey suggests, according to BusinessTravelNews.com.