How Is Your Utility or Energy Company Addressing Spend Compliance?

Utilities and energy companies are required to comply with municipal, state, and federal regulations, including those of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). However, many of these organizations have multiple outdated, on-premises legacy financial systems to maintain and audit employee spend data.

This can make it difficult to:

• See how money is being spent and by whom.
• Review and control employee spend before it happens.
• Enforce and improve compliance with spend policies and accounting and financial regulations.
• Spot data patterns that may be hidden across channels or systems.
• Actively identify and mitigate spend fraud, waste, and abuse.

The Answer? Modernize and Automate

To overcome these issues, utilities and energy companies need to modernize their systems so they can automate spend control and improve compliance.

This enables internal teams to:

• Capture digital records and improve the accuracy of expense reports.
• Insert controls at the point of purchase to reduce fraud and manage non-compliance.
• Gain visibility into future travel and spend with spend requests and approvals.
• Provide a secure, cloud-based solution across teams and locations.
• Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically review expense and receipt data.
• More importantly, it will provide more clarity and certainty to make better and more informed decisions about spend.

Then…Audit Spend

When spend happens, organizations must also have the right tools, procedures, and processes in place to audit employee spend and expense reports. Because doing an audit manually can be time-consuming, stressful, and expensive, these organizations should look for a technology solution that can simultaneously automate the audit process and improve efficiency and compliance.

Best Practices for Inserting Spend Controls to Achieve Compliance

As your organization levels up its spend management systems, be sure to apply best practices for spend control to ensure compliance, such as:

• Create straightforward spend policies. Make sure these encourage spending that supports your utility organization’s goals.
• Provide ongoing training on your travel and expense policies and tools. This will enable your employees to make more policy-compliant spend choices.
• Require pre-spend authorization before spending occurs. Have managers review spending for office expenses, equipment, mileage, etc., in advance to prevent non-compliant activity.
• Use an online booking tool with built-in policy by traveler. Restrict different types of travelers’ ability to select out-of-policy options to increase compliance and modify behavior.
• Use an expense reporting system with built-in policies and user guidance. Insert spending thresholds, flags, and other automatic notifications to help guide users when filling out expense reports. This can help prevent and identify non-compliant behaviors (e.g., lack of documentation, overspending, unauthorized use of expense types, etc.).
• Use mobile receipt capture and point-to-point GPS mileage tracking. Not only will this eliminate the need to scan or attach paper receipts to an expense report and ensure accurate mileage reporting, but it also increases the accuracy of data entry.
• Regularly conduct audits to ensure compliance with your policies. This will help you identify any areas where training may be needed.
• Implement robust reporting to analyze spend and make improvements.

Now is a great time to update your systems and automate spend management. Not only can a great spend management solution help your organization insert important spend controls and gain more visibility into employee spend, but it will also increase compliance with your company’s spend policies.  

Want to learn more about how to level up your utility or energy company’s spend management? Use these resources to help your organization get started today:

Download this one-pager to learn about some of the biggest challenges organizations face with controls and compliance, and tips to address them.

Download this eBook for 4 ways to measure your audit efficiency using your SAP Concur solutions.