Don't Let These Bad Habits Hold Back Business Growth

It is generally accepted that if you’re serious about growing your business, you’re more likely to succeed if you have clearly defined goals and a plan in place to achieve them. But it is also important to look at any barriers to growth, especially within your own business.

Let’s take three examples:  

1. Paper-based expense and invoice processes

When you’re small, there are only a handful of expense claims and supplier invoices each month and getting sign off on them is easy because there is only one person in the approval chain – the boss.

But as you grow, all this changes. Now there are hundreds of expense claims and invoices a month and there is paper everywhere. Plus, there are several people in the approval process and sign-off can take weeks when people are out the office or you’re based in multiple locations. It is annoying for employees and suppliers, while the finance team is always playing catch up and can’t plan expenditure sensibly.

When London-based charity Thames Reach moved to SAP Concur, filing in the first six months went from a six-foot-high filing cabinet to a concertina file. Indeed, research suggests that automation speeds up the expense approval process by up to 80%.

2. Lack of policy compliance

Formal travel and expense policies are often written and then forgotten. Employees rarely check them and the finance team doesn’t have time to do anything more than cursory spot-checks on claims. As you grow, this can become a problem – in fact, more than half of employees may book out of policy. So how can you be confident your spend is under control?

Automation can solve this problem by embedding policies in the system. Employees are alerted when spend is out-of-policy so it can be stopped at source and you can gain confidence in your compliance.

3. Too much unapproved spend

When you’re small, everyone in the company knows the purse strings are tight and every purchase is carefully considered. But as you grow, this also changes. Even if all employees are budget-conscious, small purchases here and there soon start to add up.

Automation gives you a way to get insight into spend and control it. Luke Braham, head of technology operations at SAP Concur customer RED, said: “We’ve been relaxed in the past and we needed to be less relaxed. SAP Concur gives us a way to do this. For example, we realized we spent £27,000 with Amazon last year and it was all unapproved. We’ve now moved to a single Amazon Business account. The spend will be approved going forward, which is a big benefit.”

Understanding the common theme

The finance team is essential to business growth in the insights it can offer and the support it can provide. But it is also true to say that its processes are a crucial factor in business growth too.

Cumbersome paper-based processes create work for people throughout the business, meaning more time is spent on admin and less time on the work that will propel the business forward. Similarly, policies and systems that lack transparency mean no one has the insight needed to be able to reinforce policies or inform future spend.