How to get the most out of your money, part 1: Efficiency

There’s more to spending than simply handing over money. (And if you’re simply handing over money, we’d like to get in line.) If, on the other hand, you’ve got a keen eye on the budget of your small to mid-size business, you clearly understand the importance of getting a dollar’s worth of work out of every dollar spent.

In this blog series, we’ll examine the three lynchpins of spend optimization:

• Efficiency—You have to spend it anyhow, spend it right.
• Compliance—Spending within the rules.
• Visibility—You can’t control spending you can’t see.

We’ll also connect you to resources that show you how you’re doing, how your peers may be doing things differently, and what to look for in a spend-optimization solution.

For more features behind effective spend optimization, download the full e-book.

How much does it cost to spend a dollar?

Every single nickel your company spends is critical, and as business grows and spending happens faster and faster, it gets harder and harder to keep track of it all, let alone manage your buying power.

Sure, you’ve got processes and protocols in place, but odds are, the paperwork behind said regulation is bogging your team down to the point of distraction. So not only are you not getting every dime out of every dollar, your people aren’t as effective as they should be.

That’s simply too high a price to pay.

Controlling spending isn’t as impossible as it sounds.

With the right system and support in place, you can eliminate the need for things like paper receipts and lengthy invoice approval processes. You can give your accounting team one system, instead of random ledgers and spreadsheets. You can set up automatic audits, so everything is as it should be. And when you do all those things, you can trim reimbursement times to pay people faster.

In the meantime, ask yourself a few questions to see if you could find greater efficiency in the office:

1. Are your people walking invoices around the office looking for approvals?
2. Are you and your accountants cobbling together spending reports built from a stack of spreadsheets?
3. Do you spend your Saturday mornings auditing expense reports?
4. Are people waiting to get paid because reimbursement takes too long?

If you answered “yes,” to any of the above, you probably need a new way of doing things. Here’s what to look for when looking for a spend management solution: Check out the Top Features E-Book. And, learn more at Concur.com.

See more: How to get the most out of your money, part 2: Compliance

See more: How to get the most out of your budget, part 3: Visibility