Does Your Expense Management Work from Anywhere?

The pandemic changed everything – how we live, how we work, and how we manage spend.

The sudden move to a hybrid environment caught many businesses off guard – quickly exposing the inefficiencies of manual processes and workflows. Digitalization is a top priority across the board, and finance and IT are tasked with finding cost-effective solutions – fast.

When it comes to the old way of doing expense management, all bets are off. Paper is completely out and businesses are seeing entirely new categories of spending for the home office that impact forecasting, budgets, and cash flow. In short, processes and policies that once relied on people being in the office are no longer tenable.

As companies play catch-up, it’s often hard to know whether the processes we put in place over the past 18 months were just a stop-gap or are sustainable and scalable over the long term. To help finance teams figure it out, the experts at SAP came up with a simple checklist to determine if your expense management is keeping pace with hybrid work demands.

First, you need to look at processes. Are they truly digital? If your employees are still scanning and e-mailing paper receipts and submitting expense reports in spreadsheets, then they are not. Keying in expense data is not only time consuming and error-prone, it also results in missing spend data when employees forget to submit receipts for a given transaction. The result is, at best, more time wasted going back through image and PDF files. At worst, it means gaps in your spend visibility. The only way to consistently apply spend policies, control costs, and understand what and how your company is spending is to automate expense management – from data capture to reporting and analytics.

If you’re unsure about whether your current setup is working for your remote employees, just ask. Remember, this is a whole new way of working, so there are bound to be some (if not many) hiccups along the way. Find out which expense management processes are simple to do from anywhere and which are not. See if your people have thoughts about new policies or suppliers. And ask how hybrid work is affecting their spending overall. In addition to gaining valuable information for finance and IT decisions going forward, you’ll also show your employees that you value their input – which will help get them on board as your expense management strategy evolves.

The next thing you’ll want to look closely at is your spending and what it’s telling you. Are you seeing changes in the types of things people are buying? Is your current supplier base able to meet those needs in a cost-effective way? Are there tax implications for remote-work purchases you need to know about? The only way to answer these questions and others is with clear, complete, and current expense data that is available to finance in a single place.

To clarify your spending even further, you’ll also need to evaluate your current expense categories and policies. For example, are there categories for home office equipment, supplies, software, and so on? Or does your “other” category continue to grow? With the right categories, you’ll have an easier time determining which expenses are ongoing and which are one-time purchases, so you can more effectively predict, plan, and budget for the future.

More spend categories invariably means increased auditing. So, you need to be sure your team is able to accommodate. Intelligent technology and services that enable automatic expense auditing and verification not only make life easier for auditors, they also help them take on more work without additional staff and overhead.

The last item you’ll want to review is approval times. Remote work can draw out the expense reporting process as spreadsheets are passed from employee to manager to auditor. Missed or buried e-mails mean time-consuming follow up and delays in consolidating month-end spend data. This makes it harder for finance to close the books on time and it slows down expense reimbursement – which can lead to disgruntled employees. Again, the key is automation to keep everyone on top of their approvals without a single e-mail reminder. Auditors and budgeting teams get the cash flow info they need when they need it, and your people get paid back faster.

Read our latest e-book to find out more about what expense management automation can do for your organization. Then take this self-guided demo to see how the Concur Expense solution can help.