As a software vendor in the accounting, payroll, or HR space, you know the importance of simple and efficient business tools. Expense management might not be your core offer, but it touches what you do and it is important for your customers. Perhaps you don’t currently offer an expense tool, or you have an in-house solution for capturing receipts. Maybe, you send customers away to third party apps.
If you’re nodding ‘yes’ to any of those scenarios, it might be time to consider better value alternatives – like a white label app or APIs from Findity. They can add serious value to your software with minimal effort and no development costs on your part. Let’s take a look at your options.
Third-party apps
Chances are, your app market is home to hundreds of third-party apps covering all the features and add-ons that sit outside your core offer to customers. Functions like expense management.
It’s nice to think that handing over responsibility to a third-party expense app provider makes life easier for everyone. But with so many options on the market, leaving customers to do their own research gives them a time-consuming and difficult decision to make.
Customers will almost certainly look to you for guidance when choosing the right expense management solution. That’s because they’ve already entrusted you with other important aspects of their financial or HR needs. Pushing them away to a third party can result in a broken customer journey.
If your customers have a bad customer experience with a third party in your app store or a referral to another vendor doesn’t work out, it reflects badly on you. A negative experience with a third party can hurt your brand and sour the customer relationship.
Not only is it a missed opportunity to add customer value with your own comprehensive expense solution, but you’re also leaving money on the table.
What options do you have?
Business-wise, having your own expense product makes a lot of sense. You can go about it in different ways. One solution is to develop it in-house, but – as you already know – this can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. That’s why many software vendors choose to keep costs down by developing either a basic solution or not having one at all.
Developing an expense solution from scratch and getting it off the ground takes between 1 and 5 years – around 35,000 development hours. With a white label or API solution from Findity, you can be up and running within 3 months and with all the functionality your customers need, including per diem, mileage, and receipts.
In our white paper ‘Accelerating growth with expense management’, we deep dive into the common strategies to consider and their pros and cons.
