Handling Difficulties in Expense Management with a Robust Spend Management Platform
Finance, supply chain, and procurement departments have to work together to tackle broader business challenges. Though each team has a unique function, spending decisions should be made quickly. Adapting and responding to changes in the business, eventually creating new business strategies, and tapping into a new and changing workforce is important. To develop a strategic approach for spend management, companies rely on data.
Most finance departments say that the metrics they have don’t accurately measure business performance. Also, they can’t make better decisions when they have outdated planning tools and processes. The view of data is more complicated as businesses are automating systems to address individual needs like travel, expenses, and procurement, without ensuring these systems talk to each other. Information silos create a lack of visibility that certainly impacts the bottom line.
Businesses should have total control over each category of spend as well as a comprehensive way to manage spending and strategy across categories. Traditional systems that work independently can’t do both. All systems have to communicate so that data comes together quickly and offers visibility to make decisions and respond to the rapid pace of change.
Businesses need intelligent spend management; it is all about integrating systems to gather every source of spend, across each category, for one unified view, allowing them to focus on more key challenges. Also, intelligent spend management requires a comprehensive view of spend across the company.
In today’s global marketplace, procurement has to go beyond traditional processes. To transform their procurement and spend management processes, organizations must find new ways to collaborate from source-to-pay so they can compete in a global economy.
An integrated spend management system uncovers a company’s competitive edge by connecting buyers with suppliers and other business partners through a single interface. Companies can access, exchange, and manage transactions with their own business rules. They can control costs, manage spend, and minimize supply chain rise – all from a single solution.
By enabling new collaboration potential, the solution fills the information gap in the procure-to-pay process and reduces the complexity of compliance. Before a transaction takes place, suppliers are examined and business policies monitored. Therefore, as supply chains grow more difficult, the ability to collaborate becomes even more valuable.
The online solution allows buyers and suppliers to collaborate on scheduled payments, managing cash, and working capital to their mutual benefit. Suppliers of all sizes can track new sales opportunities. It provides a valuable e-commerce channel that enables small businesses to compete with large enterprises for new business taking advantage of today’s global economy.
Businesses can accomplish many tasks via a video conference, but travel remains essential – especially when expanding into new markets. Corporate travel and expenses are one of the key areas of spend for a company after compensation, and they are completely in the hands of employees. In today’s global market, companies must account for all the ways people travel, from approved vendors to travel bookings, international taxes, and currency fluctuations.
Also, international travel presents many issues for businesses. They have to plan for how many days a foreigner can work in the country before paying local income taxes. Companies must make sure all spending is within-policy, especially when policy and local rules are at odds, or when the receipt is in another language.
A robust spend management platform helps manage all of these sources of expenses, making sure employees are spending in-policy, manage cash appropriately, and understand the ROI of travel costs. Now finance teams have the tools to manage the entire travel request to reimbursement process with user-friendly tools that provide transparency. Also, these tools allow finance to easily find spending and policy errors as they happen and correct them in real-time. Businesses can track where spend is being allocated, to easily find insights and ensure compliance.
Expanding a business is more than hiring new people. There are so many variables included in assessing the total cost and risk which makes it more difficult than ever. An automated spend management system gives financial teams insight into spend and exposure across every category through a single point of view so that they can reduce risks, find opportunities, and boost agility in an ever-changing world.
A single view ensures employee spend lines up with business priorities, so organizations can fund innovation and growth as well as their core business. Management gets real-time visibility into all KPIs, helping them dive in to take action. Also, managers can spend wisely using robust ad-hoc analysis and predictive algorithms.
Bottom Line:
Intelligent spend management helps to ensure that spending moves the entire business forward. Real-time data offers total control over each category of spending as well as a better understanding of spending and strategy across a defined set of categories. An automated spend management system enables businesses to optimize spend while increasing business agility.
