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If you or your employee spends as little as a day working in another state, you could be violating state tax laws if you don’t file a tax return there, according to a recent article on the CNNMoney blog. Each state has its own rules for reporting income, and frequent business travelers could be responsible for filing dozens of different state tax returns. For organizations whose employees travel regularly for business, travel expense management tools are essential.

Armed with a calculator and a pencil, you compare an employee’s expense report to her receipts and find a mathematical error. Congratulations: You’ve just saved the company $35. The only problem is that auditing these business expense reports can easily end up costing more than it saves, especially if you manually process the reports.

The right expense management software can help reduce compliance risks and improve operational efficiency by using automation, electronic payments and analytics to increase transparency.

When it comes to understanding how to survive an audit, you’ll discover it really isn’t all that difficult. Granted, not many people out there enjoy being audited, but more and more businesses are adopting audits as a way to keep costs down and to make sure there is compliance with various regulations, both local and federal.

Back in the olden days, spreadsheets were considered the finance team’s dream data structure. Many accountants developed complex algorithms to turn a spreadsheet into a full blown application and fully managed their finances through their spreadsheets. In 2004, CFO.com found that out of 14 technologies discussed with finance executives, spreadsheets were one of the two most widely used tools for running their departments.