How to Build Business Resilience with Automated Spend Management During a Cost-of-Living Crisis

Navigating a cost-of-living crisis is about looking beyond the challenges of today and building long-term business resilience.

Offsetting rises in inflation by controlling costs is important but to ensure your business survives whatever challenges are up ahead, you need to automate your business spend management for longer-term success.

Controlling costs and compliance, improving the employee experience and focusing on spend governance are all important steps in weathering economic downturns, and ones we covered in the first three blogs in this four-part Cost-of-Living series. 

In this, the final blog, we look at how automated spend management can help business resilience and optimise your future.

By connecting automated expense, travel and invoice processes together so that spend data flows into one place, businesses can make agile decisions, adapt to change and build stronger relationships with customers and partners. The right solution will also build sustainability into your spending processes. 

What Do Businesses Need to Do Now?

Whilst intelligent technology and automated business spend management are key to building business resilience during economic downturns, to implement the most effective plan for YOUR business you need to establish exactly what you want to achieve and the steps you are going to take to get there.

You also need to streamline internal processes and procedures, which will involve:

• Increasing agility to adapt to changing working environments, for example hybrid working
• Using technology innovations to find new ways around challenges
• Connecting with an ecosystem of partners to help support spend management goals

 

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Which Technology Will Impact the Future?

To identify gaps in your current technology, ask yourself  these three key questions:

• Have our current processes and technology helped or impeded agility in recent years – and how? 
• Does our current technology allow us to easily forecast, revise a budget, or decide where to invest next?
• Does the technology drive us towards reaching our sustainability KPIs?

Automated business spend management helps to maximise the time available for the productive strategic work that’s required, to ensure your business is in the best possible position to rally against future challenges – including environmental ones.

Using intelligent technology, you can automatically review each expense report and invoice, flag what needs your attention, and continuously get faster and better as the system learns.  

How Can SAP Concur Solutions Help?

It’s the forward-thinking businesses that adapt and react fastest and that are the quickest to bounce back.

SAP Concur solutions give complete spend control regardless of where your employees work, as well as offsetting rises in inflation and the cost of living, by increasing spend visibility and control whilst freeing up time to focus on long-term business resilience. Here are some of the benefits you can expect:

Improve cashflow

Gain confidence that cashflow is safely controlled with a near real-time, accurate view of all spend. For example, every invoice that comes in will flow through the right approvals, get scrutinised for accuracy and will be checked against the POs you have and what you’ve received.  
 

Early payment discounts

With Concur Invoice you can build robustness by increasing employee and supplier satisfaction, avoiding late fees and even taking advantage of early payment discounts with approvals that take days instead of weeks. Businesses can realise 11 percent cost savings through supplier negotiated rates and discounts.

Remove inefficient audits

Audits are key to maintaining compliance and reducing fines, keeping your business safe and on track. Intelligent Audit allows you to take the workload and stress from your employees’ shoulders and speed up the audit process, enhance compliance, mitigate risk, improve VAT reclaim and drive continual improvements.

Make agile decisions that strengthen the business

69 percent of companies worldwide believe automated travel and expense (T&E) processes have improved their ability to make data-driven decisions. With Business Intelligence and Consultative Intelligence your business gets real-time reports in an instant, via turnkey dashboards and reports that keep everyone up-to-date on budgets, compliance and forecasts, without wasting hours assembling data. 

Become a sustainable business

Your customers, employees, regulators and community care about sustainability and waste and that’s not going to change. 29 percent of businesses worldwide say helping reduce paper waste and carbon footprint is a top benefit of implementing an automated T&E management solution. From eliminating scraps of paper with automated expense processes, to embedding sustainable travel choices into TripIt Pro, as part of TripLink, you can manage key sustainability metrics and forge a reputation for being a sustainable business. 

Strength in numbers

From travel management companies to financial services partners, the ecosystem of SAP Concur solution partners offer bottom line savings, improved employee productivity and rapid ROI.

Secure Your Future Today

In addition to controlling day-to-day spend, now is the perfect time to ensure your business spend management process supports organisational agility and builds business resilience, whilst helping achieve long-term, sustainable goals.

SAP Concur solutions undertake the expense, travel and invoice management tasks that can slow your business down, so that you can focus on being ready for whatever is around the corner.

To find out more about how automated business spend management can unlock greater resilience for your business, read our eBook