Control AND Flexibility: Two Sides of the Spend Management Coin

Finance leaders know how important it is to have maximum control over spend management. Cash flow, cost savings and business continuity are areas that have come into sharp focus since the pandemic. At the same time, if the past few years have taught us anything it’s that we need to respond flexibility and rapidly to opportunities and challenges.

It’s very easy to think you can’t have both control and flexibility, but that’s not the case. When you have a data-driven view of spend, they’re two sides of the same coin. You can watch every penny and react rapidly when you need to.

A data-driven view of your spend is exactly what SAP Concur solutions can give you. Let’s look at why. 

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Heads – It’s Spend Management Control 

In a traditional finance set-up, information is backwards looking. You know how the business looked at the end of last month, but not right now. If you want any detail, you need to search for paperwork or trawl through spreadsheets, a process that’s typically too time-consuming to be realistic. But if you can’t see spend, you can’t control it.

This is a concern when you consider that invoice and payment fraud costs organisations £92.7 million each year. And when it comes to travel and expense, 37% of claims have at least one exception, which includes waste and misuse.

On the other hand, when you have a complete and near real-time view of employee-initiated spend, you’re equipped to recognise errors and take action to prevent or mitigate them.

Our core solutions, Concur Expense, Concur Travel and Concur Invoice automate these processes, giving you a granular and timely view of these three top line areas of spend. At the same time, you’re enhancing productivity and improving the employee experience by removing time-consuming data entry tasks. 

You can add additional Audit Services to extend the value even further. For example, as your business continues to adopt strategies to build resilience, gain momentum and stay ahead of the competition, it’s vital to assess your processes to discover and fix issues before they can do significant damage to your bottom line or lead to non-compliance. Technology is key to assisting with tackling this issue: 94% of executives agree that advanced technologies can promote the quality of their audits. SAP Concur’s audit features and services enhance compliance and help you identify potentional fraud and the action to take to prevent it. 

Tails – It’s Spend Management Flexibility 

When you gain control with a spend management system you don’t lose flexibility. In fact, the opposite is true. 

SAP Concur solutions combine T&E processes into a single, integrated, spend management solution that ensures consistent processes across the business. They integrate with ERP solutions too. It means all your spend data is in one place and you’re equipped with a complete picture so you can adapt and react proactively no matter how rapidly circumstances change.  

Reflecting on his experiences during the pandemic, SAP Concur customer, Runjit Bhopal, Finance Director at Landbay, explains: “Our access to data meant we were able to conduct scenario planning and run up to 20 scenarios with no difficulty. The board was meeting up to three times a week, all with near real-time data to look at.” 

You improve flexibility for employees too. For example, with solutions such as Concur TripLink and the partners in our App Centre, you can give employees the flexibility to book with their preferred suppliers but still capture every piece of spend data. 

As businesses increasingly adopt hybrid and flexible working arrangements, it’s important to enable employees to continue working efficiently from anywhere. That means ensuring they can continue to make compliant spending choices without the admin burden, or having to find workarounds. We’ve heard of employees putting unapproved spending on their personal credit cards and finance leaders having to courier paper invoices to employees’ home addresses, which obviously hinders spend visibility while definitely not being a good use of time!  

Cloud solutions help keep you on top of this, as well as rules and regulations  on everything from duty of care to reclaiming value-added tax. There are also options to drive focused improvements in specific areas such as sustainability. 

It’s Heads AND Tails  

Research from Gartner shows that businesses that want to facilitate growth need to have access to the data that will improve their decision-making. It’s because data gives you the two sides of the spend management coin: control and flexibility. And when you have these, you’re equipped to foster stability and resilience as you take the business forward. 

Download 6 Ways to Grow Your Business Through Spend Management Automation for more guidance on how you can get the flexibility and control balance right in your business.