Do Your KPIs and Solutions Reflect How You Spend Today?

Responding to global conditions, the shift to hybrid and remote work, new regulations, and other factors, how your business spends has changed and keeps changing. But the methods you use to see and measure it all might not have kept up.

Intelligent travel and expense solutions, especially as part of an integrated and automated spend management system, are important allies in seeing, controlling, and measuring spending and making your business ready for change. For example, reports within Concur Expense allow deep dives into expenses by employee or purchase type. And Concur TripLink and TripIt Pro provide control and a fuller view of spending by gathering trip and expense details from travel partners and outside bookings.

Are Your KPIs Keeping Up with Spending?

Learn about metrics that can pinpoint risk, gauge budget accuracy, and improve overall program performance as well as your employee’s spend management experience.

Download the scorecard

Knowing and determining the KPIs that reflect today’s spending and priorities is one step to improved visibility. Another is learning the key capabilities a spend management solution should offer, from artificial intelligence that captures receipts and invoices to advanced analytics that enable precise control and the ability to spot trends.

Adjusting your metrics for spending visibility and control

Spend management has no shortage of performance indicators, and many of them, in ways large and small, can improve your view of dollars coming and going.

Here are some to consider that:

• Target possible risks by uncovering taxable employee benefits in expense reports, reducing high-mileage spending, and identifying cash spending occurring when corporate cards are the better option.
• Improve your program’s performance by tracking required receipt submittals, reducing problem receipts, and confirming data accuracy.
• Gauge budget accuracy by lowering late fees for supplier payments, evaluating changes and refunds to employee reimbursements and vendor payments, and better measuring actual vs. budgeted spending.

Boost employee experience and utilisation by tracking manual work, setting goals for team member feedback, measuring user use of solutions, and assessing the effectiveness of in-app guidance that’s provided.

Determining what capabilities spend solutions should have

Just over half of finance leaders – 51% – tell us that cost management is among their top concerns, and 45% say inadequate software capabilities hold them back.¹

To gain better visibility and control, your travel, expense, and invoice data should be managed in a single platform that:

• Collects all bookings made outside your corporate booking tool, which brings clarity to an often invisible spend source and allows you to obtain discounts, control costs, and ensure policy compliance.
• Integrates with the company’s ERP and other finance systems to deliver near real-time spending data and an accurate view of cash flow.
• Uses embedded AI to itemise receipts, check every expense against policy, track taxable employee benefits, and establish audit trails for fraud, taxes, and sustainability.
• Empowers budget managers with easy-to-use dashboards and on-the-go approval tools.
• Offers advanced and customisable analytics that prepare forecasts and help you manage with precision, with numerous reports and communications abilities that keep stakeholders informed.

Discover more ways to improve spend visibility

• Get our scorecard – Spend is Changing. Are Your KPIs Keeping Up? – for a look at many metrics that can help ensure what you’re measuring reflects the spending evolution of recent years.
• Use the 7 Ways to Increase Visibility and Control Over Spend checklist to learn the capabilities a spend management platform should have to improve your spending visibility and control and gain the agility it needs to overcome the change and challenges ahead.
• Read the Travel and Expense Performance Benchmark Report to gain invaluable insights for helping your company improve its performance and prepare your organisation to be ready for whatever comes in the future. 

1. CFO Insights Report: Repositioning for Growth, SAP Concur, March 2024.