Build a business case for spend management software: travel and expense

The question isn’t whether your business wants to grow, but whether it’s ready for it. There’s conclusive evidence integrated travel, expense, and accounts payable (AP) technology can make your business ready for growth. The challenge is building a business case for spend management software.

One single, cohesive spend management platform improves the efficiency, control, spending visibility, and insights necessary to pursue opportunities, ride out challenges, and transform and grow your business. It’s a powerful combination, but as you begin to build a business case, it helps to more fully understand how spend management can drive growth, how AP technology expands upon your travel and expense (T&E) solutions, the costs of doing nothing, and key steps for building support and justifying investment.

How spend management and growth connect

Connecting spend management software into a cohesive platform provides clarity, productivity, compliance, and other capabilities to grow your business. With SAP® Concur® solutions helping people and processes function as one, you obtain a competitive advantage.

Our recent research bears out how companies with an integrated T&E solution benefit from:

• 21% savings in travel booking and expense reporting
• 20% savings in invoice processing
• 26% increase in policy compliance

Building efficiency, targeting growth: the research

New SAP Concur global research illustrates how managing travel, expense, and accounts payable with a single platform saves money, raises productivity, and deters fraud.

Get the report

What connected spend management delivers

Save time, energy, and frustration. Whether booking travel, submitting receipts, or handling invoices, employees have a consistent, user-friendly experience  instead of jumping through hoops. With automation, employees don’t need to keep track of paper receipts, as transactions will automatically flow into an expense report.

Gain a single source of truth. With data moving smoothly between solutions, businesses operate from a single point of financial truth. Travelers have one place to go for booking trips and managing expense reports;travel managers can control spending with access to near-real-time booking and travel spend data, as well as manage duty of care.

Control spend and optimize your cash flow. With connected spend management, finance leaders gain visibility into where every dollar is going across all sources of company spend. This unfiltered insight allows you to identify opportunities to further optimize costs and cash flow.

Connect to a world of options. Your company can bring payment providers, nearly 400 travel management companies, NDC and global distribution content, and a wide range of specialized apps and services into the fold.

Tap into years of innovation. SAP Concur solutions draw on huge amounts of data and decades of experience, which translates to built-in innovation and continuous improvement. For example, AI has been embedded in Concur solutions for nearly a decade. 

With fully integrated spend management capabilities,  your competitive advantage is only a few clicks away.

Bring it all together: integrated T&E and accounts payable

Each solution providing spend and expense management automation can bring improvement on its own. But bringing it all together into one platform compounds the value.

Strengthen control and compliance

AI supplies accurate trip cost estimates, while in-app guidance guides employees to compliant choices. The company can consistently apply policies across request, booking, expense report, and invoice functions. Dashboards provide reports and analytics built upon near-real-time data. AI-fueled audits uncover duplicates and errors, find patterns humans can’t, and deter fraud.

Boost efficiency and productivity

Employees have a single interface to book trips and approve, reimburse, or analyze spending. Instead of manual tasks, the finance team can forecast, uncover savings, and negotiate discounts. Instead of corralling receipts and expense reports, travelers can concentrate on making sales and serving customers.

Gain extensibility, scalability, and a truly global approach

Concur solutions are readily extended with specialized tools such as Concur Request, Verify, Invoice Capture, and TripIt Pro. For specific spending or regulatory challenges, you can likely find a solution in our 900+ partner ecosystem. Operability is global, encompassing 170+ countries and numerous languages, regulations, and currencies.The platform evolves alongside you as your business grows.

How you may be missing out on growth

Foregoing spend management software and managing everything manually is, of course, an option. But there is a clear cost of doing nothing. Lost opportunities and unmet challenges mean missing out on growth.

• Artificial intelligence proliferates: AI deciphers receipts and invoices, personalizes trips, deters fraud, and strengthens analytics. But AI’s use is built upon automation. Businesses cannot benefit from one without the other.
• Spending evolves: The how, where, and what of spending changed with remote and hybrid work. Desks, internet, and other charges now appear on cards as part of stipend programs. Multiple travel booking channels compete for attention with corporate tools. Employees prefer flexibility and consumer-friendly tools. All test your control, costs, and legacy systems, ultimately slowing you down and stifling growth.
• Tax and compliance shift: Tax authorities demand money and compliance and are going digital to get them. Automation and AI can help your keep up to date in multiple jurisdictions and manage taxable employee benefits and value-added tax (VAT). You can also reclaim a higher percentage of the VAT you’re due.

Building business cases for travel, expense, and AP management

Finance’s growing prominence in recent years brings increased responsibility to collaborate. That extends to building a business case for spend management software.

Engaging stakeholders is critical. As you begin to build a business case for AP automation or integrated T&E solutions, ask finance, AP, travel, IT, and HR leaders about their needs and frustrations with the status quo. Gather input, too, from those using the technology day in and day out, because they have perspectives leaders may lack.

Making the business case to different audiences

• Be sure to adapt as you build support, tailoring messages to:
• Managers reviewing expense reports.
• Travel managers trying to please both travelers and corporate leadership.
• Finance teams suffering from inadequate visibility, cost control, and policy management.
• AP team members chasing details, tiring of tedious tasks, and hoping to capture early-pay discounts.
• IT pros worrying about implementation, integration, security, and the resources to handle it all.

 And, of course, C-suite executives weighing big pictures and ROI.

When working the crowd, pack numbers along. Such as a 64% leap in invoices processed monthly or travel bookings occurring 15% faster. And a positive ROI just eight months after implementation. ¹

5 steps to help build a case for automation

1. Explain the difference between simple digitization – spreadsheets and electronic payments, for example – and fully connected cloud-based solutions that bring near real-time spending visibility.
2. Assess how current solutions perform and establish benchmarks. Use the information to demonstrate efficiency, cost or labor savings, productivity gains, and other measures influencing ROI. Don’t overlook softer categories like employee satisfaction or reduced risk.
3. See what outside analysts and reviewers say about specific solutions, so you can make informed comparisons and vendor recommendations.s.
4. Explain how automated solutions are flexible, extendable, scalable, easily implemented, and able to operate globally.
5. Align expense management automation’s benefits with top company priorities, whether growth, efficiency, sustainability, risk reduction, employee experience, or all of the above.

Think that only big businesses benefit from travel and spend management software? Think again

Some organizations with separate spend management solutions still have silos, as the solutions aren’t linked to one another or an ERP.  Other businesses think they’re too small for managed travel programs. It’s likely not so, considering the potential costs and risks of doing without.

Smaller businesses should determine whether their current approach:

• Provides control and can guide travelers to the best rates, make compliance the easy choice, obtain discounts, and get the most from every dollar.
• Wastes travelers’ time because booking requires bouncing between websites to find flights, lodging, and rental cars.
• Puts safety at risk because they can’t easily locate travelers when problems arise and lack ways to share updates on health issues, natural disasters, and trouble spots.

Conclusion

Just as SAP Concur solutions streamline processes, this blog seeks to simplify the process of building a business case for investment and innovation to grow your business.

Evidence and a systematic approach are essential when advocating for travel and spend management software. So, too, are examples from other businesses. Several finance and travel leaders have shared success stories with us.

“It frees up my time and everyone else’s time to do more value-added work,” Rebecca Spanos, Director – Travel & Payment Card Services, UNC at Chapel Hill, shares in the video. “I'm super excited about … the feature in Request where now you can simply say, ‘I’m going here, I’m going for these dates, give me cost estimates,’ because right now they do have to put all that information in. It’s a state requirement, but it takes time, and so just simplifying that process can be a huge win for us.”

¹Analysys Mason 2022, Travel, Expense, and Vendor Invoice Management Study