Optimising Reporting and Compliance in Professional Services

Every business needs to protect their reputation. But for professional services firms, the pressure to be squeaky clean is even greater.

You must account for every expense you bill back to a client, and you need to ensure that spend data and reporting is always aligned with the latest HMRC standards and regulatory requirements. You can’t afford the inefficiency, inaccuracy, and lack of transparency that comes with manual spreadsheets and piles of paper.

In fact, most professional services firms don’t consider their current spend processes to be efficient. And only 9% are completely confident that travel and expense claims are properly checked (Vanson Bourne, 2017).

How Technology Can Help
A connected spend management solution can help in two key ways:

1. For employees – Providing an intuitive user experience that makes the process of complying with your businesses travel, expense and spend reporting policies easy 
2. For managers and leaders – Delivering a solution that enables you to gain greater visibility and control over trends and behaviours, so you can optimise the good and correct the bad

Let’s look at each of these areas in a little more detail…

Tools That People Love to Use
 

• Mobile Optimised: Employees can use their smartphone to snap photos of receipts and immediately upload them to expense claims. Approvers can review on the go too. According to Aberdeen Group research, mobile users have a 91% compliance rate for travel and expense policies, compared with 59% for non-mobile peers.  
• Mileage Tracking: Even if your employees are on the road, accurate data can be captured. Concur Drive takes the guesswork out of mileage by tracking the actual distance driven for more accurate claims.
• Integrated Data: Company credit cards can be linked to SAP Concur so that information can be automatically captured in expense claims. This can improve productivity and data accuracy.

Solutions That Give Finance Greater Control
 

• Simplified VAT: With SAP Concur, VAT is calculated by expense type so you can recover money from HMRC without falling foul of legislation. Laws like the UK Bribery Act can be applied too, automatically factoring in currencies, exchange rates and international tax rates and regulations.
• Auditing Services: You can take the pressure off your finance team by outsourcing auditing tasks like receipt and policy compliance. Expense claims can be verified and cross-checked against existing policies to ensure maximum compliance with minimal hassle.
• Visibility and Reporting: Automated solutions help businesses access centralised data so they can report accurately on spend, both internally as well as externally. This level of insight and control makes enforcing policy much easier too, as you can identify problem areas and take instant corrective action much sooner.

Want to know more? Visit the SAP Concur website