When you’re responsible for your own bottom line as a salesperson or broker, you know it’s important to be organized – especially when it comes to expenses. Lots of little costs add up: a cup of coffee here, a taxi ride there. It’s a lot to juggle. Before you know it, you’re swimming in receipts. You wonder when you will have time to enter these expenses into your spreadsheet or onto your paper ledger.
What if you could enter expenses as they happen? What if you could discard paper receipts? And what if this all meant you could actually focus on serving your clients more?
You can do all of this with automated expense management technology. It eliminates all manual entry, better organizes and tracks expenses, and ultimately saves you lots of time and money. It’s simpler. It’s easy to use.
The last thing you want to do is spend hours learning and using new technology. The best kinds don’t require training or onboarding of vendors. They also don’t require you to speak to a salesperson. You should be able to turn on your phone and go.
Imagine this scenario: Connect to your e-mail on your cell phone or take a picture and all of your expense documents automatically come together. You can even upload paper documents through apps or a website if you prefer.
The big draw here for those in real estate: eliminating paper receipts that you stuff in your briefcase when you’re taking around a client. Why let paperwork be a distraction when it can all be done on your mobile phone? And, don’t bother with fancy accounting software on your computer. Take it from us: You will pay a lot while receiving very little. Many folks have stared at more financial tasks than they actually need to do their job. It’s not worth it. Keep it simple and use your cell phone.
It will save you time and money.
We have seen many salespeople and brokers save hours simply by switching from paper ledgers to expense management tools.
What about money? You will save lots of it – quickly. We’ve worked with real estate professionals who started saving in the same month that they began using it. You can probably save yourself an extra $500 to $2,000 each month depending upon how much work you do. Can you imagine what that would look like over the course of an entire year in this kind of business? It’s huge.
Bottom line: If you want to take control over your seemingly never-ending expenses, use automated business technology. You can spend more time growing your business and less time on inefficient data entry. And, as an added bonus: you’ll keep your car receipt-free when you’re taking around that important client.
James Thomas is the founder and CEO of Itemize, a payments data company whose technology transforms receipts and invoices into structured information for commercial card data enhancement, accounts payable management and employee expense tracking.
