Cloud Solutions Can Help Manage Your Business Spending Better

Although cloud-based solutions are transforming the industry, many businesses forget to update their travel and spend management systems. With spend management solutions, organizations will have increased compliance, transparency in decision-making and a better picture to allocate expenses, making it easy to focus on delivering better services to users.

According to a recent survey, around 40% of organizations still use pen and paper, while 27% use Microsoft applications such as Excel to generate expense reports. All these processes are difficult to track, prone to errors and vulnerable. Employee initiated-expenses are the second largest controllable expenses for most organizations.

Cumbersome spend management processes mean delayed reimbursement times. Over 80% of employees stated that it takes two or more weeks for expense claims to get approved. More surprising is that employees do not benefit from simple features such as direct deposit, expense reporting, integrated travel booking, receipt creation and approvals – all of were considered as top priorities.

Automating internal processes and turning to cloud-based solutions is easy and an effective way to improve the transparency, which is important for organizations that work with tighter budgets. With improved expense-tracking, businesses can better control costs and cut down the spending by adopting SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solutions that require less human involvement compared to legacy systems.

While adapting to the cloud is really important, the cloud’s cost savings, scalability and, improved security can help organizations focus on strategic initiatives rather than spending on expense management. As far as cost is concerned, automating spend management processes can cost a small amount of maintaining legacy systems and offers immediate returns on investments.

The benefits of spend-management solution go beyond financials. Users encounter a wide range of issues with their existing systems, which includes mobility as well. Mobile capabilities such as receipt capture, report creation and approval are important as workforce turn to increasingly mobile. There are thousands of employees on the road who would like to book and change travel plans, submit invoices from their mobile device just as easily as making a purchase from an e-commerce website.

Moreover, a unified spend management system can facilitate travel and expense management process, while giving you greater transparency into business spending. A modern spend management platform is not just about travel, expense reports or invoices. It’s all about a connected system that allows applications to talk to each other. The unified platform allows data to seamlessly flow between the systems. Inspite of allowing businesses to gain a complete picture of spending, spend management solution enrich employee experience, improves decision-making, increase compliance and focus on strategic business activities.