How Strong Is Your Spend Control? Assess Your Business Agility to Find Out

In the new world of hybrid work, being apart means being more connected than ever. As business leaders, we must stay agile in order to adapt to ever-changing market landscapes and support our people while maintaining business control. Digitalization and integration are prerequisites to making that possible – especially when it comes to how you manage company spend.

Whether your focus is on building resilience or reinventing your business to support growth, consistent, disciplined spend management processes and universally enforceable policies are a must. Even one small gap in spend visibility can open you up to unnecessary risk and costs – leaving your finance team to figure out where that money went and negatively impacting your bottom line.

At SAP Concur, a business unit of SAP, we’re dedicated to helping companies like yours achieve the agility, efficiency, and visibility you need to weather hard times and scale with you to meet your greatest potential. Over the past year, we’ve been working closely with business leaders from around the world – learning how they are using integrated, intelligent spend management to stay on top and prepare for the future.

Now, with our online Business Agility Assessment, you can evaluate your own spend management capabilities to see if you have the agility and control you need to succeed whatever the future may bring.

The assessment begins by looking at your expense management processes. For example, are your people still hassling with paper receipts and spreadsheets? Or is your whole process automated – from receipt and card transaction capture to expense categorization and data mapping?

Next, we’ll ask about how you manage vendor and supplier invoices. Again, is your process mostly manual, with time-consuming error-checking and review? Or do you have intelligent invoice management tools that allow digital processing and automatic flagging of questionable or erroneous charges?

In addition to process digitalization, we’ll want to evaluate convenience and ease of use. Do your spend management tools require a lot of user training? Do employees need to have their computer open to perform workflow steps like submitting reports and completing approvals? Do auditors need to follow up with emails when information is missing or late? Or are all these steps simple, intuitive, and accessible anytime, anywhere using a mobile app?      

While comprehensive digital spend management is a good start, we’ll also ask about connections and integration across your organization. Are your travel, expense, and invoice management systems completely separate? Are they integrated with each other, but not with your back-end systems for ERP, CRM, and HR? Or do you have all your data in one place, giving finance teams deep, near real-time insight into spending across categories, business units, regions, teams, and even individuals?

Your answers about integration will then lead us to examine your level of spend control. Do you struggle with out-of-policy spending? Are you wasting money on incorrect invoices and late fees or missing out on discounts? Or can you quickly and easily audit expense reports and invoices for errors and noncompliant spend while also timing vendor payments in a way that minimizes costs and optimizes cash flow?

Finally, we’ll ask about the makeup of your spend management landscape and your technology providers. Do you have multiple systems from different companies or one partner that offers a total spend management solution as well as global 24x7 service and support?

Once your assessment is complete, the results will offer insight into how your processes for managing company spend are impacting your business agility and control. You will also gain access to our spend management toolkit, which offers a collection of best-practice initiatives, continuity plan templates, and information on hundreds of partner apps that can help you extend the value of your spend management solutions.  

In just three minutes, you can take the first step toward building a spend management program that will help you improve your visibility and insight, make life easier for your employees, improve operating margins, and increase profitability.

So, what are you waiting for?

Take the Business Agility Assessment now. Then visit us online to find out what SAP Concur solutions can do for you.