Stay Resilient and Responsive with Automated Spend Control and Compliance
These are unprecedented times for your business. You and your people are adapting to a new way of life and work. Whether it is VPN, virtual meetings, process automation, or centralized data access, the right technology will be critical to your ability to stay flexible, productive, and profitable, so you can continue supporting your workforce and your customers.
Whether business is booming or you are concerned about the future, you still have to buy the things you need to keep operations running. But when it comes to managing that spend, e-mail-, spreadsheet-, and paper-based expense and invoice management processes are a nonstarter. Automation is no longer just about saving time that could be spent on more value-added tasks – it is about your newly-remote accounting team’s ability to manage cashflow, stay on top of costs, and redirect budgets to where they are needed most.
According to a recent survey by AMI Research of 500 financial decision makers at small and midsize businesses (SMBs) around the globe, 59% indicated that automation allows them to better respond to business challenges due to improved spend visibility.1 This improved responsiveness puts those companies one step ahead when it comes to dealing with the new challenges we all face.
On average, SMBs process 110 expense reports and 217 invoices per month.2
With SAP Concur solutions, you can get that work done anytime and from anywhere using mobile apps and automated workflows.
Managers and employees can review and approve invoices as well as track and manage expenses right from their phones – a must-have convenience for teams working from home. Plus, with all the data in one system, finance and accounts payable (AP) won’t need to manually rout documents, dig through e-mail chains, or track down approval delays.
Prior to deploying automated spend management solutions, 61% of SMBs reported lack of visibility into cash flow as a major challenge and 66% wanted to track and analyze expense trends and pinpoint opportunities to reduce costs.5 So, in addition to making it possible for your people to keep doing their jobs, automation will increase spend control to help your business stay out of the red.
With SAP Concur solutions, you can automate and integrate expense and invoice management, bring all your spending together, and see where to save, where to renegotiate, and where to redirect budgets based on your plans and priorities. Plus, all your spend information is clean and categorized correctly using AI and machine learning. Not only will your finance team gain the visibility to ensure on-time payments, avoid late fees and double payments, and capture early payment discounts, it will also have the insight to cut unnecessary costs and negotiate better deals – making it possible to reallocate those savings where you need them most. Budget managers will also have greater visibility into what’s been spent and what’s pending, so they can better plan, forecast, and allocate resources.
Managing risk and compliance is another critical business function that can no longer be handled manually from the office. Already, more than 60% of SMBs report difficulty staying on top of industry-specific regulations, including pulling together materials for audit prep and time spent on expense audits due to noncompliance.6
In addition to the increased efficiency, spend visibility, and financial insight automation brings, with SAP Concur solutions, you also get the support and guidance of auditing and review services that help ensure compliance and increase oversight and accuracy without increasing workload for your teams. Plus, whether it relates to internal policy compliance or external regulatory requirements, you can automatically apply spend controls and audit rules to every transaction, allowing you to flag noncompliant spending before it even occurs. And, with the ability to bring all expense and invoice data from across budgets and departments together in real time, you can track spend by category, vendor, cost center, team, employee, and more – helping identify errors and waste quickly so you can take immediate action.
These are uncertain times – for you, your employees, and your business. Let us help by allowing you to see and manage all your spending from anywhere in real time, so you can be sure you’re getting the most out of dollar.
Find out how you can control spend, improve visibility and compliance, maintain profitability, and make spend management – and life – simpler for your people by taking a look at our small business offerings today.
1.–6. “Control Spend and Maximize Savings with Travel, Expense and Invoice Automation,” AMI Research sponsored by SAP, Month 2020.