4 Tools to Rein in Your Spending Cowboys

Rogue spend can be the archnemesis of even the most seasoned finance departments. Yet when you consider how much time it takes to wrangle rogue spend, you can understand why. IDC found that roughly 80 percent of today’s spend managers’ time is spent on lower-level financial tasks such as invoice matching, purchase requisition, and vendor management. Not to mention, lacking visibility into where, with whom, and how much all your cowboys are spending makes it difficult to capture a full financial picture for your business.

If your organization is having trouble properly governing spend, then it may be time to call in some reinforcements:

Tools for reducing wasteful spend

• Sometimes, employee preferences are hard to change – especially when it comes to travel. Instead of punishing employees for spending out of policy, consider rewarding them when they make decisions that benefit your business. Rocketrip helps employees earn rewards (like retail gift cards and charitable donations) when they spend under budget and stay within policy, plus your organization gets to enjoy the cost savings. This approach in reducing wasteful travel spend has saved organizations an average of 30 percent on travel expenses alone.
• And sometimes rogue spenders can work in your favor — enter ridesharing. Employees opting to rideshare over traditional services, such as taxis and black cars, can save organizations an average of 30 percent on ground transportation. But if employees are spending directly with these ridesharing companies or manually expensing rides, it can reduce visibility into overall rideshare usage across the company, hinder decision-making, and lend itself to waste and abuse. Uber for Business and Lyft Business can integrate with your spend management platforms to automatically add rides to expense reports, helping employees comply with policy, and providing a better view into exactly where your dollars are being spent.

Tools for connecting siloed spend

• It’s clear to many finance departments that automating and integrating travel and expense (T&E) brings great value to the business. But what about spend outside of T&E, such as accounts payable and procurement? A recent IDC study found that 53 percent of surveyed businesses currently manage different types of spend (direct, indirect, T&E, and services) with separate applications. But when rogue spend is dispersed throughout many systems, you drastically reduce your view into various categories, which, in turn, restricts informed decision-making and hinders your ability to quickly adjust spending due to changing government regulations and the needs of your business. By utilizing financial integrators, you can seamlessly transfer spend data from your spend management system to your ERP, financial, and other systems. As a result, you can establish end-to-end, real-time visibility into spend, gaining the ability to better control and redirect it as needed.

Tools for improving spend against budgets

• While an effective budget can be the bread and butter of your business, it goes without saying that ineffective budgets can be your downfall. Therefore, wrangling in your spending cowboys is especially imperative when it comes to how you manage your budgets; proactive and effective budget management reduces operational interruptions and improves the effectiveness of planning activities. To lasso in your rouge spending, considering choosing partners that can help you better align your dollars spent against what’s projected. VAT reclaim solutions, for example, allow organizations to recoup a significant amount of spend on travel by helping increase VAT reclaim by up to 50 percent. While spend associated with travel is just one category within your overall budget, the benefits gained from reclaiming up to half of that spend can be extremely impactful.

Wrangling rouge spend may seem complicated, especially when it’s assumed you have to manage it all alone. But when you choose to empower your business with the right tools, you can easily get the support you want and the visibility you need.

To learn more about SAP Concur partners that can help your business with better spend governance, visit our App Center.