Has Disruption Gone Too Far or Not Far Enough?

It’s practically a corporate mandate these days to be uncomfortable with the status quo. To continually disrupt the way things are done. To look for ideas, techniques, and technologies that create new boundaries and push business further.

Organisations like yours have disrupted old ways of thinking and developed new ways of doing what you’ve always done. You’ve advanced production, you’ve changed service delivery, you’ve reimagined ways to engage and connect with customers.

These changes have necessitated disruption in your back-office processes as well, and both systems and solutions have had to evolve. But often, some fundamental financial and operational functions get overlooked — like travel and expense — where even small changes can have an enormous and positive disruptive impact across an organisation.

Taking travel and expense somewhere it’s never been.

It’s a “basic” financial function, and if it works, why change it? Turns out, there’s good reason. Analyst IDC recently did research into companies who’ve transformed their expense, travel, and invoicing processes — automating and otherwise bringing them into the “digital age.” And they saw significant benefits to rethinking how you manage this type of spend.

Business-user productivity benefits: When a business offered its employees a way to book trips or file an expense report through a simple website or mobile app, the process, of course, was faster and those time savings quickly add up. IDC calculates these organisations are realising annual productivity gains of $715,604 per organisation. That’s $35,647 for every 100 users.

Back-office staff productivity benefits: When users can book business travel and file expense reports and invoices more easily, back-office staff can more efficiently process trips and reports — and pay vendors quicker. At the same time, an integrated travel, expense, and invoice platform gives auditing staff faster access to the financial data they need. Overall, IDC projects these efficiencies are worth $649,400 per organisation, or $32,349 per 100 users.

Business trip cost reductions: When organisations can insert their T&E policies directly into the system, it ensures that more users follow the rules and avoid overspending. These companies also gain better visibility into spending by specific vendors, which strengthens negotiations for better pricing with airline, hotel, and rental car partners. IDC calculated that these savings are worth $591,239 per organisation per year, or $29,452 per 100 users.

$1.9 million in annual savings. This is what disruption could do for you.

All told, IDC identified these savings could add up to $1,956,243 for your company — all by bringing innovation to an often-forgotten finance function. To find out more, download the IDC whitepaper: Empower Organisations to Digitally Transform Their Expense, Travel, and Invoicing Processes

Blog #3 in series, to read blog #1: Robots Aren’t Going to Steal Everyone’s Job, But They Will Do The Parts No One Likes or #2: Innovation Isn’t All About The Future