It’s Unblocktober! Time to Flush Out Your Spend Management System with SAP Concur Solutions

During October, to mark the annual month-long Unblocktober awareness campaign, thousands of Britons will pledge to change their flushing habits to promote cleaner waterways. For the environment, Unblocktober is great news — 48% of the nation pour fats, oils and grease (FOG) down their drains. Huge fatbergs of congealed fat, oil, grease, personal hygiene paper products, face masks and rubber gloves block drains and sewers, causing them to work less effectively.

It made us think about the various blockages in traditional spend management processes that hold organisations back from reaching their financial goals and what can be done to eradicate them. Just as people can help clear the waterways with small changes to their habits, what if you could break down all the frustrations and roadblocks in your spend management workflows and create a smoother, more sustainable future for your business? The good news is you can.

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Breakdown the Five Financial Fatbergs

First, you need to identify your financial fatbergs, in other words those factors that clog up your finance workflows and prevent a streamlined, efficient expense, invoice and travel process. By removing these financial fatbergs, you can unlock valuable insights that help you control cash flow, plan for future growth, enforce compliance, and mitigate risks, all whilst hitting your sustainability targets.

Automation speeds up the review, processing, payment and auditing of expense, invoice and travel, making it easier for finance to manage expenses and budgets effectively, as well as improving supplier negotiations – all without a single piece of paper.

So, let’s look at some financial fatbergs that can be broken down by automation.

1. Diverse spending habits

Employee spending channels are more diverse than ever before, which makes keeping track of disparate spend data more difficult. Regardless of payment method – whether its p-cards, corporate cards or some other form of payment – with a centralised, dashboard-based spend management solution, all the data flows into one place. You can see where spend bottlenecks or maverick spend is occurring and uncover insights to drive business decisions.

2. Fraud and non-compliance

Fraud and non-compliance are huge roadblocks to reaching your financial targets. When expense and travel policies are embedded in the process, you can reduce policy violations by monitoring expenses and bookings and adjusting processes to mitigate risk earlier in the process.

Improved granularity of your data makes everything flow better. Firstly, it gives you greater risk management so you’re better prepared for audit time. Secondly, it empowers you to ensure correct tax submissions and maximise reclaim opportunities. Finally, it helps you optimise expense categories because you can see where you have too little — or too much — detail.

3. Employee safety and environmental risks

Unhappy, anxious and dissatisfied employees can be the largest potential barrier to success but, on the flipside, the biggest opportunity to achieve more. Automation gives you enhanced Duty of Care with clear, visible data on where employees are at any given moment and alerts about any last-minute changes to their itineraries or local risks to their safety.

4. Cashflow problems and forecasting

Not having clear visibility into spend makes planning for future growth a challenge. A clear view down the tunnel of past spending habits means you can make better future planning decisions. With automation you can also increase procurement leverage because you know how much you’ve spent with every supplier. Reporting functions allow you to track key trends and data across your entire organisation so you can identify what’s working and what isn’t.

5. Achieving sustainability goals

Unblocktober is about protecting our environment for a better future. Business sustainability goalposts are continuously changing and without the tools to go paperless, you could be hitting roadblocks, missing key targets and letting down your employees, stakeholders and your customers. As an example, most small and midsize business AP teams we work with, handle 600 invoices and at least half of those invoices are coming in as paper invoices. 

SAP Concur solutions enable you to move away from spreadsheets, paper invoices and receipts to an entirely web and mobile-based expense, invoice and travel process. For business travellers, whether it’s communicating environmental measures and policies to your employees at the travel planning stage, offsetting the carbon emissions of a business trip or encouraging the use of electric rental cars over petrol or diesel, with automation you can make smarter, data-driven decisions and flag policy compliance violations automatically.

Let It Flow

When it comes to spend management, it’s time for change. Don’t go blindly down the same blocked pathways as before. SAP Concur solutions connect your ecosystem of finance processes, methods and stakeholders. With easy access to all your expense, invoice and travel spend in one place, you create a clearer flow of spend data and a faster path to reaching your goals.

In today’s world, can you really afford to not have a clear run at success? To find out more visit Concur.co.uk