How Can Digital Spend Management Improve Work Life and Support Business Growth?

The world is looking toward the post-pandemic horizon.

Hope for the future is strong, but the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will reverberate for years to come. This is as true for your employees’ expectations as it is for your business. Adapting to change that accommodates both will be critical to your organization’s success. People want the flexibility to work from anywhere and expect to have the tools required to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. Keeping employees happy while also supporting growth will depend on digitally transforming operations and maintaining tight control over cash flow.

This is where finance and IT come in.

How Finance and IT Can Empower Growth and Employee Experience

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Company-wide digitalization and business expansion cost money. To make the most of every investment – from home-office equipment to travel expenses to purchases from suppliers – requires clear spend visibility. It is only by working together that finance and IT and provide the necessary technology and data to make that visibility possible.

So how do you get there?

The first step is to take stock of spend management at your company today. Do you have the process efficiency, spend control, and transparency you need? Are your spend policies and workflows flexible and scalable enough to support operations over the long term? Or are you simply in a workaround state – relying on e-mail and spreadsheets to gather expense and invoice data, secure approvals, and keep track of spend?

One of the few silver linings of the past year and a half is that it has forced finance teams to come to terms with the inefficiencies and gaps in their spend and cash flow management. No matter where they are in solving those problems, one thing is for sure: There’s no going back to the old way of working. Finance leaders need IT to bring together siloed data, automate manual operations, and enable deeper levels of insight if they hope to continue investing in growth and ensuring a satisfying job experience for employees and managers in their own department and company-wide.

Luckily, SAP Concur solutions can help.

A recent study by Oxford Economics shows that organizations that have already digitalized expense or invoice management are seeing increases in spend visibility (37%), organizational agility (47%), cross-functional collaboration (36%), and employee productivity (43%). 

By connecting your travel, expense, and vendor invoice management processes and data and integrating them with back-end ERP or financial systems, SAP Concur solutions allow you to see, manage, and control all your spending – no matter the category, location, payment type, department, or individual employee. With policy compliance built into every transaction, making good spending choices is easier for users, and red flags are raised before noncompliant or even fraudulent spend ever occurs. And because the solutions are cloud-based, you can quickly scale the system to meet your growing needs. The end result is a unified and up-to-date view of spend data that gives finance teams the insight they need to make smart decisions that help save on costs and redirect spending in ways that support your specific growth strategy.

On top of all this, SAP Concur solutions also make life easier for your employees.

Gone are the days of paper-based process that tie workers to their desks and have finance teams chasing down reports and approvals at every turn. User-friendly mobile apps for expense reporting, travel booking, and mileage tracking make it easier to manage expenses while on the go. Add automated workflows, and auditors, managers, and the broader employee base are spending less time and making fewer errors than ever before – allowing them to stay focused on value-adding tasks.

The same is true for vendor invoice management. By allowing vendors and accounts payable to submit and process invoices remotely, payments go out faster and finance has greater visibility into upcoming spend and future cash flow.

The bottom line: By working together to digitally transform spend management across your entire organization, finance and IT can empower your whole business to achieve the agility and financial stability it needs to grow and thrive over the long term. Plus, by giving employees the tools and the flexibility to work efficiently and effectively from anywhere, you are not only improving their work experience, you are establishing operations that can keep running no matter what the future holds.

Read our latest e-book to find out how finance and IT leaders at companies like yours are using SAP Concur solutions to support growth and make daily work life better.

Then visit us here to see what they can do for your business.