Managing Scale: How Will You Ensure Speed and Quality Across Continuous Finance Processes?

If you’re a CFO or in another finance leadership role in a growing enterprise, everyone looks to you to provide real-time, data-enabled decision support and guidance on how to achieve growth goals. For example, line-of-business executives want to know:

• How can I best align my department to achieve our top growth priorities?
• Are we spending in the right places at the right times to drive growth?
• Where can we better manage our discretionary spending on things like travel, expenses, and products and services so that more budget is directed toward growth initiatives?
• How can we free up more employee time for strategic initiatives, rather than administrative tasks like expense reporting?

But as a finance executive, do you have fast access to the data needed to generate the right insights and answers for these stakeholders? And can your processes scale to bring new levels of speed, efficiency, and quality to the continuous processes you oversee?

A Real-World Example

Consider, for example, how within most organisations, expense reporting remains a notoriously manual, cumbersome, paper-driven process that consumes a great deal of employee time. Given that CFOs report that on average, 60% to 70% of enterprise time is spent simply gathering information that’s consistent and adequately understood by their organisation, can you afford to keep relying on such inefficient expense management processes? As your business grows internationally, it will only get harder to aggregate and understand key finance data and help stakeholders answer questions like those listed above.

The answer to these challenges isn’t throwing more people at the problem, or simply automating your existing, stand-alone finance processes. You need digitally transformed processes that integrate, scale with your business, and instantly provide both a granular and unified view of all costs, even as your business expands internationally. Equally important, you need to bring more intelligence to these processes so people can work smarter and you can share insights with business leaders for better decision-making.

New digital, cloud-based travel and expense (T&E) management applications – which encompass expense capture, expense auditing, analytics, and spend benchmarking – are turning expense report submission and review into a seamless process.

As noted by IDC, “Organisations recognise they need to adapt to modern, flexible business T&E processes and increase efficiency. This adaptation is done by replacing T&E processes that were previously handled manually (mainly through spreadsheets) or in custom applications with newer cloud-based commercial T&E applications. With modern T&E applications, financial professionals and travel managers no longer manually monitor and approve expenses; instead, T&E applications incorporate company policies and expense auditing to reduce fraud.”

Choosing the Right Solution

T&E is one of the most mature enterprise apps markets in terms of cloud penetration, as noted by IDC, who has positioned SAP Concur in the Leaders category within its IDC MarketScape focused on “Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Travel and Expense Management Applications 2018 Vendor Assessment.” Concur Expense is particularly ideal for midmarket or large enterprise businesses looking for fully integrated travel and expense applications that operate globally and use other SAP HANA cloud applications.

And as explored in a new e-book, because it integrates seamlessly with Concur solutions for travel and invoice management, you can gain full visibility and control over all employee spending – not just expenses.