Turn Pits into Peaks This Mental Health Awareness Week

Mental Health Awareness week takes place from 9 - 15th May and encourages people in the UK and across the world to focus on achieving good mental health. The Mental Health Foundation created this awareness week 21 years ago and each year has a theme. This year, the theme is loneliness.

Loneliness is affecting more and more people across the UK and this was heightened throughout the pandemic. Connecting with other people and our community is fundamental to our mental health, and this includes employees who are still working from home.

While adopting a hybrid working model or working from home full-time brings many benefits to both employees and businesses, it’s important to make sure colleagues are always connected. If this connection is lost, the business risks miscommunication and higher stress levels.

So, how can you effectively keep employees connected? A good place to start is within your finance department because it underpins many areas of your business and can be an area that can cause stress if processes don’t run smoothly. We’re going to go through a few common pain points that affect both employees and the finance team and tell you how automation can help reduce stress.

Making Life Easier for Employees

Pit one: Traditionally, it’s down to employees to manually enter details correctly but any mistakes could cause stress and delays.

Peak one: By automating your finance processes, any discrepancies across finance reports will be flagged before they have been approved; for example some finance automation solutions will check values against receipts before the report is sent to the approver.

To take this even further, spend management solutions with a mobile app allow employees to create expense claims on the go by capturing spend as it happens. They simply take a picture of their receipt and the receipt scanning app will automatically turn those photos into data – eliminating manual data entry and human error while saving time for travellers and support staff.

Pit two: Employees are expected to remember complicated policies, which can lead to accidental fraud

Peak two: Finance automation solutions enable you to holistically implement your policy at every step, reminding employees which expenses are within policy and which aren’t. You can create rules that tell employees if their spend is against policy, reducing the amount non-compliant and fraudulent spend.

Pit three: Mistakes and delays to reimbursement can leave employees frustrated and out of pocket

Peak three: Businesses using a spend management solution to automate their processes typically see a 50% reduction in time for a user to be reimbursed. Finance automation reduces reimbursement time because approvers get sent expense reports as they are submitted and can be prompted with messages to get faster approval.

Pit four: Finance teams are struggling to find new ways to remind employees to submit expenses

Peak four: Automation ultimately makes submitting expenses easier and faster. Many solutions will allow employees to submit and build their expense report throughout the month, rather than wait to do it at the end. Some spend management solutions come with a mobile app, which means employees can submit their expenses in any place, at any time. Finance automation makes submitting expenses not just the right thing to do, but the easiest thing to do.

Pit five: Manual processes leave finance buried under piles of paperwork

Peak five: By automating your travel, expense and invoice processes, you can cut down on paperwork by digitising your processes, while streamlining the way your business works. This means many of the day-to-day tasks that bog down your finance teams will be alleviated, so they can focus on more rewarding tasks like reaching goals and growing the business.

Pit six: Security and prevention of fraud is a heavy burden that falls on the shoulder of the finance team

Peak six: At a time when company stability is so important, security and fraud can become very stressful to finance teams. Finance automation reduces the amount of cash spend and encourages the use of P-Cards. Spend management solutions allow you to audit up to 100% of your expense claims, so you can be sure that no fraudulent spend is slipping through the gaps.

Stress can potentially lead to big problems for both employees and businesses but by introducing finance automation you can alleviate some of that stress, while streamlining your business and making the most of the opportunities it brings. By using SAP Concur solutions, employees will feel happier and less stressed, which will lead to increased productivity, talent retention and better mental health outcomes.

To find out how finance automation can benefit your business, check out our website.