Mundane Matters: How Onerous, Everyday Tasks Hurt Employee Productivity and Business Performance – and What You Can Do About It
Are your finance processes creating stress and frustration for your employees – and wasting their time when it should be directed toward serving customers and growing your business? Think about the processes just about every employee needs to engage in – such as travel booking, expense reporting, and reimbursement and ask yourself – and your colleagues:
- Are expense reports often turned in late because employees must take the time to manually gather, tally, and staple receipts to a form?
- Do people often lose paper receipts and complain about being unable to get fully reimbursed for business and travel-related expenses?
- Are AP employees bogged down by manually entering and reconciling invoices?
- Are employees frustrated by how long it takes to get reimbursed for expenses they have already submitted? Is this creating financial stress for them as they “float” your business costs?
- Are your finance employees frustrated when they must pull the data they need from multiple systems?
- Is it difficult for finance staff to know if spending data is accurate and up to date?
- Are clunky, frustrating interfaces slowing people down and making it harder to get people to comply with policies?
If you’ve answered yes to even one of these questions, your employees are likely feeling the pain of poorly designed processes that involve double-entering data, having to print and fill out forms, or being unable to access important information or do work while working remotely. These types of inefficiencies can cause frustration across your organization, especially when employees feel they are being pulled away from more impactful work or need to work nights and weekends to get it done instead of recharging with friends and family.
In addition, agility and innovation – which are essential to success – are difficult to come by when employees are spending valuable time on inefficient, manual tasks that could be made easier, such as manually filling out expense reports, tracking mileage, chasing down approvals, conducting audits for noncompliant spend, reconciling vendor invoices, and receiving documentation.
Here's the good news for small midsize businesses
Thankfully, we live in an age in which intelligent automation can increase efficiencies in all aspects of work, including the finance function. With the right tools – such as travel, expense, and invoice management from SAP Concur solutions – you can apply intelligent automation to these processes. This can eliminate wasted time, increase efficiency, optimize performance, and provide mobile access for employees – all while giving finance a more complete view of spend. Imagine being able to:
- Eliminate “busyness” and deliver greater job satisfaction, improved productivity, and a better employee experience to AP and finance teams, too, allowing them to focus on the more rewarding and business-critical aspects of their jobs.
- Provide your finance team with faster, more accurate data, giving them more control over cashflow, visibility into spending, agility to respond faster to change, and intelligent insights that can drive bottom-line improvements.
- Ease the burden of travel, expense, and invoice management tasks, which helps your organization retain talent by letting them focus on the value-added tasks that matter.
According to Gallup, impacts like these improve employee satisfaction and engagement, which can tangibly improve your business. They found that companies with high levels of employee engagement report[1]:
- 17% higher productivity
- 21% higher profitability
- 24% lower turnover
Ready to Get Started?
It’s time to re-imagine travel, expense, and invoice management processes and the technology you use to power them. To jump-start this process, download our checklist that provides 6 Steps for Finance Leaders to Improve Employee Experience and Your Bottom Line.
[1] “State of the Global Workplace." Gallup, 2017.