Level Up Spend Management to Ensure Compliance and Accountability for State and Local Government

Embracing Change for Continued Success

The pandemic unexpectedly forced organizations to rapidly digitize their processes. Now that state and local government organizations have some breathing room, it’s time to assess the rushed fixes. Are they effective or do they need to be fine-tuned? Are there blind spots? Can they uncover new opportunities or areas to innovate and get ahead of the competition?

One critical area to evaluate is employee spending. Better visibility into and control of employee expenses are imperative to any organization’s success. Every decision to spend is an opportunity to invest. But these spending decisions—the moments that move your organization forward—carry both opportunity and risk. By underpinning your moments of decision with comprehensive data and trusted insights, you can act with clarity and confidence.

Collaborate to Seize Monumental Moments

It starts with collaboration. Get your finance and IT departments together to discuss the added benefits of digitizing finance processes. Determining your desired outcomes is a natural place to start. Whether you want to gain a more comprehensive view of spend, proactively control budget, improve employee experience, or drive policy changes to increase compliance, a spend management platform helps you get there. Here’s a little insider tip: Digital spend management tools automate manual operations, connect disparate data, and allow for rapid insights. When finance and IT unite to provide near real-time visibility into spending and cash flow, the entire organization benefits. These data insights allow departments and teams to seize opportunities and act decisively and strategically during key moments of decision.

Risks and Fraud Are Evergreen

Managing spend has never been more complex, and although the pandemic slashed spending and grounded travel, it increased risk and enabled compliance to creep up in unexpected ways. The abrupt shift to a remote/hybrid work model drove spend in high-risk categories like miscellaneous and mail/phone order. From 2019 to 2020, the T&E spend violation rate skyrocketed 292%.¹

Fraud continues to be a serious problem in all industries.² Sixty-nine percent of fraud occurs in for-profit companies and median losses are nearly $120,000.³ Some of the industries with the highest dollar value loss of fraud are:⁴

• Utilities $200K
• Government $150K
• Healthcare $100K

As for government agencies, the extent of fraud varies by the level of government organization.⁵

• National government – 46% affected ($200,000 median loss)
• Provincial/state government – 27% affected ($56,000 median loss)
• Local government – 25% affected ($125,000 median loss)

Spend Smarter

Every spending decision is an opportunity to invest in your organization. Making better spending decisions and inserting the proper controls helps organizations receive better discounts, manage costs and risk, and minimize fraud. Ninety percent of decision-makers in a recent IDC Report say there’s room to improve how they control spend.⁶ Their top priorities are to:

• Enhance data accuracy and completeness of metrics (39%)
• Manage complexity of regulation and compliance policies for spending (36%)
• Improve their ability to stop poor spending decisions before they occur (33%)

Accurate and complete metrics along with real-time data and reporting help executives manage day-to-day activities. They also allow organizations to have more confidence in the insights that underpin their significant moments of decision.

When people, processes, and technology come together to empower the future of spend management, the benefits include:

• Increased visibility into company spend
• Better alignment of spend with business goals
• Improved cash flow management and policy compliance
• Better employee experience (employees spend less time on tedious manual work, and more time on the fulfilling strategic work that satisfies and retains them)

Level Up for Life’s Monumental Moments

SAP Concur knows it’s the meaningful moments that make organizations run better. When you level up employee spend management, you make those moments count. For organizations with strong IT and finance collaboration that have rolled out digitized, automated spending solutions, they have seen improvements in organizational agility (47% increase), productivity (43% increase), and spending visibility (37% increase).⁷

Organizations that deploy an integrated spend management platform like SAP Concur solutions, manage their travel, expenses, and invoices in one simple platform, and see measurable savings and gains in efficiency:⁸

• $777,000 annual savings on business travel and expense reporting costs
• 65% more compliant expense reports submitted
• 52% fewer errors in reporting expenses

To learn more about how to level up to an integrated spend management solution, download our “Level Up to an Integrated Spend Management Solution for State and Local Government” ebook.

¹SPEND INSIGHTS | How the Pandemic Has Altered Spend and Introduced Risk (SAP/Oversight Systems)

^{2, 3, 4, 5}ACFE Occupational Fraud 2022, A Report to the Nations

⁶The Future of Spend Management: Approaches, Opportunities, and Challenges in a Digital World (November 2019)

⁷Oxford Economics, Leadership in a new era: IT steps up (October 2021)

⁸IDC white paper “The Business Value of SAP Concur Solutions for Optimizing Travel and Expense Operations” (February 2022)