When you’re growing a business, it’s important to track your expenses.  Even if you’re running an online venture, as your business grows you’re going to need to leave your living room at some point, whether it be to conduct interviews or attend conferences.  As it grows some more, you may even want to pay other people to hit the road and do some of that work for you.  Today we’ll be discussing three, incremental ways to track these expenses as your business grows.

Step One: Separate Your Money

When your business is in infancy, you may have business money flowing into your personal bank account.  Keeping things that way is a sure fire way to loose track of personal vs. business expenses.  Things like airline tickets, meals while you’re away, and rental cars will be harder to separate when you have to go through your statements at tax time.  Separating accounts makes everything much clear cut, and will save you a lot of headaches.

Step Two: Track Everything

As you grow, you’ll incur more expenses.  While  you can sift through your business account statements at the end of the year, it’s a lot easier to track things as you go.  Apps like BizXpenseTracker make it quick and convenient to log expenses in real time.  It allows you to track things like mileage, hotel rooms, airfare, and even make separate entries for expenses that may be personal, like tchotchkes you bring home for the family, on top of logging your actual hours worked.

Step 3: Track Everything Everyone Else is Doing

As you get bigger, you’ll likely start hiring on people to do work for you.  In these cases, an app is great for monitoring their travel expenses, but you’ll need software behind it to help you analyze, approve, and process it so they can get their reimbursement checks in an expedient manner.  Paid employees are happy employees.  Software like Certify does just that, allowing employees to log photos of receipts via mobile, and producing analytical data for you to boot.

Depending on the industry you’re in, you may need to have a fleet to get the work done.  Whether you are providing cars to employees to make long, sporadic trips, deliveries around town, or a regular commute in a specialized vehicle, you’re likely including gas as a part of the deal. For fleet cards like Motorpass, the benefits of discount fuel cards are hard to argue with.  You can cap each transaction, get discounts on fuel, and get real-time data concerning spending patterns as you keep track of those expenses.

When you have a business, it’s important that everything is scalable.  “Everything” includes tracking expenses.