Right Tools and Approach Improve Spend Visibility and Control

Controlling and seeing your company’s spending has always been important, and even more so with the turbulence, disruption, and hefty change of recent years. While many businesses have automated and improved processes, many opportunities remain to achieve better visibility, efficiency, compliance, and insight.

With the right tools and strategy, your business can overcome common challenges that obscure your view and make it harder to manage where dollars go. For example, can you see spending for events and supplier-direct purchases, or do disconnected processes, bottlenecks, and incomplete data obscure your view and hinder financial strategy?

7 Ways to Increase Visibility and Control Over Spend

Read the checklist for seven capabilities modern spend management tools must have to provide finance leaders with spend visibility and increase cost control.

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Key ways to improve your visibility and control of spending

Adopting intelligent solutions and taking steps to simplify processes helps clarify the spending picture and prepare your business for change – rest assured, it’s coming, even if you can’t predict what it will look like.

Look for seven capabilities when considering spend management solutions. Do they:

1. Consolidate data into a single platform? Putting expense, travel, and invoice data together into one accessible solution like the SAP Concur platform ensures spending, data, and compliance processes and technology are not fragmented. Nearly 4 in 5 – 78% – of T&E decision-makers prefer a centralised platform.¹
2. Capture every travel booking? Spending can be invisible when bookings occur outside your corporate booking tool. With Concur TripLink, you can corral travel transactions from supplier sites and other sources and bring trip, traveller, and itinerary information together.
3. Integrate travel, expense, and invoice data into your ERP? Your company gains near-real-time data that expands your ability to see, control, and analyse spending. Then, you can better manage cash flow and make better decisions.
4. Automate mileage? Use a GPS-powered tool like Drive to automatically track employee trips. Your business takes the wheel and gets control over a tricky expense that frustrates employees and is prone to overspending and fraud.
5. Empower budget managers? A streamlined tool like Budget uses dashboard and provides easy-to-follow visuals and insights that let your managers track spending with less hassle and alerts them when dollars are nearing their limits. You can leap ahead in the budget process with Concur Request, which lets you approve spending before it occurs.
6. Leverage AI tools? Infused with artificial intelligence, businesses can accurately itemise receipts with ExpenseIt, review expenses for compliance and flag exceptions for human follow-up with Verify, and establish an audit trail for budget control, taxes, and potential fraud.
7. Deliver advanced and custom analytics? Dashboards and standard and customisable reports help you manage spending with precision, spot trends, and develop forecasts. Intelligence provides over 180 reports and dashboards that can be customised, while the reporting experts of Consultative Intelligence help you go deeper with reports and insights tailored to your company’s needs.

Together, across a single platform, the capabilities help you track where money is going, identify potential savings, make better deals with suppliers, evaluate your spending polices, and quickly adopt changes that increase compliance.

Read further to gain control and clarity

Learn more about how an informed approach and SAP Concur solutions can improve your spend management and adaptability:

• Learn about the Top 5 Budget Challenges for Organisations and key to control out-of-reach spending, incomplete data, and inefficient processes.
• Read the top tips on how to build a culture of compliance 
• Learn about how to bring control and compliance to unmanaged spending 
• Don’t forget to get the 7 Ways to Increase Visibility and Control Over Spend checklist.

¹ Empower the Future of Work with Intelligent Travel and Expense Solutions, Forrester Consulting, 2023.