5 ways professional services can benefit from connected spend management

| 28-11-2017

Spend management is fraught with challenges, not least trying to keep a handle on travel, expense and invoice costs. Insights from recent research show how a more connected approach can benefit businesses in the professional services industry.

1) Improve business efficiency

In the professional services industry, efficiency is linked to profitability. Errors and mistakes, time-consuming data capture and payment delays have all been named as the top challenges faced by businesses in this sector.

Automating and consolidating your travel, expense and invoice process can save considerable time and resources, which can be better spent on more profitable activities.

For example, businesses often need to charge certain expenses to their clients. Using SAP Concur, they can select which expenses are chargeable and who to charge them to. As a result, productivity improves, processes are streamlined and spend is managed more effectively.

2) Gain visibility and control

With constantly incoming and outgoing client payments, invoices, and travel and expense claims, maximising cashflow is key to keeping your business running. 35% of professional services describe their cash flow management as ‘mostly efficient’, but only 9% were completely confident that travel and expense claims were thoroughly checked by management.

Managing everything in one place is the best way to maintain full control over spend. By seeing company-wide reports, you can easily spot spending patterns and control costs, so you know exactly where you stand within your budget.

Connected spend with SAP Concur gave consultancy firm McKinney Rogers a better way to manage their expenses. Global Finance Manager Dan Moran says: “SAP Concur promotes employees’ ownership of their expense spend. We’ve gone from a manual, inefficient process to a streamlined automated one in under three months – saving us time across the board.”

3) Manage compliance

With multiple legal and regulatory demands in the professional services sector, compliance is essential. You need to be confident that your spend data and reporting is up to date with HMRC standards and regulation changes. Only 48% of professional services said that their financial compliance was ‘mostly efficient’, indicating a weak spot.

Implementing a connected approach to spend means your business can automatically stay in line with updates, as well as ensuring that only legitimate expenses are processed, so you’re not losing money due to inefficiencies or non-compliance.

4) Keep employees happy

In an industry known for its highly skilled workforce, staff retention is key. 47% of professional service businesses said they saw a decrease in their employees’ job satisfaction due to finance department challenges.

Streamlining and reducing labour-intensive manual processes can boost both job satisfaction and employee morale, reducing the risk of losing trained staff and having to invest time and money into finding suitable replacements.

Expenses Supervisor Sarah Edwards from OCS, one of the UK’s largest private companies, says of the SAP Concur solution: "Our real motivation was driven by a need to make our divisional expenses more accountable. We were previously unable to formalise a more cohesive expense strategy due to an inability to generate the reporting we needed."

5) Make informed decisions

Connected spend joins the dots on all aspects of your business, and with this bigger picture you are much better placed to make informed business decisions, particularly on budgeting and forecasting. Saving time on manually collating data and managing costs also frees up more time to think about business operations, strategy and growth.