What's Your Spend Management Costing You?

You’ve hit your spending limit. Using manual, paper-based, and outdated systems to track expenses is costing your company money and your own employees' sanity. With employees spending more money across more channels than ever before, the difficulty of keeping track of spend as an organisation is sky rocketing. Answer this question to see where your own company currently stands:

Of the list below, what do you want to be true for your company?

1. Streamlined systems
2. Maximised productivity
3. Accurate spend data
4. Enabled and satisfied employees
5. Efficient spending
6. All of the above

We’re going to take a wild guess and say you picked "all of the above." The way you decide to set up your expense process affects every facet of your business, meaning manual expense reports are taking a bigger toll on your company than you might think.

What does the average expense report cost for your company? Let’s do the math. The number of hours spent on expense reports multiplied by the average hourly salary of your staff, divided by the number of expense reports you process per year, will give you your organisation’s customised number. It looks like this: 

(Hours spent annually on expense reports) x (Average hourly rate of your processing staff) ÷ (Number of expense reports per year) = Cost per expense report

Now that you know how much your expense report is costing you, let’s dive into how automation can help.

Stay streamlined

You can happily say goodbye to inefficient, manual processing and say hello to an automated and connected expense and vendor invoice solution. With automation on your side, your company can confidently operate with reliable and streamlined expense data. Removing unnecessary steps, such as printing out documents and manually filling out information, will not only benefit today’s processes but multiply in value as your company grows and changes. Still not convinced? Then ask yourself these four questions:

• Is your accounts payable system scalable?
• Could your expense process be simplified with a streamlined solution?
• Are your employees and stakeholders getting frustrated with your process?
• Do you have the necessary technology support needed to keep your invoice system running seamlessly?

Maximise productivity

As employee spending becomes more complex, the manual reporting process gets even more painful, making your reports a recipe for wasted hours, days, and dollars. This translates into finance and AP personnel spending a significant amount of their time with manual tasks, while financial decision makers spend a lot more of their time trying to analyse and interpret data.

Hours spent x Employee hourly wage = Cost of manual process

With the help of automated, integrated solutions, you can move many manual, frustrating, and mundane tasks off your employees' plates and free up more time for yourself and others to focus on strategic tasks that promote growth. Attaining efficiencies in AP workflows can result in 37% less time spent on AP data entry – just imagine what you could do with all that free time.

Report accurately

Companies that use a mixture of paper and spreadsheets to process expenses and/or vendor invoices are especially prone to human error. Paper receipts can get lost, and it’s not hard to imagine the manual mistakes that can crop up when copying data into a form. It's no surprise, then, that 81% of finance leaders admit to blind spots when it comes to their company’s expense and invoice spend.

By catching duplicate entries, and automatically flagging expenses outside of policy, the back and forth from your employee to your accounting team is virtually eliminated. All communication can be handled within the system, and completely documented for auditing purposes. And, with automation, you could see a 33% reduction in invoicing errors. 

Improve employee satisfaction

The fact is, a better employee experience is good for business. Don't just take our word for it. The data show that when companies create exceptional experiences for employees they see exceptional results, including 17% higher productivity, 21% higher profitability, and 24% lower turnover.

But, there's more to improving the employee experience than adding gluten-free snacks to the breakroom. You must show you value employees across every touchpoint throughout their employment. This means providing technology that frees people from menial tasks so they can do the work that gives them the most satisfaction, while contributing to the organization’s bottom line. So, tools that automate travel, expense, and AP processes are critical to delivering a good employee experience. 

Maintain compliance and efficiency

Several hidden costs can fall through the cracks when using manual processes, including labor costs and fraud. Labor costs are causing many organisations to spend nearly twice as much on invoicing processes than they would with more efficient and streamlined solutions. In other words, businesses are unknowingly throwing away a lot of money.

By utilising AI to detect signs of fraud and built-in policy compliance, you can focus on preventing fraud rather than recovering from it. By putting a microscope on this area of spend you can prevent fraudsters who may be active in more than one area of the business. Automation mitigates potential fraud by restricting the ability to approve invoices and initiate payments to authorised individuals. Near real-time visibility into all processes prevents unauthorised individuals from accessing sensitive data.

Automated processes can help you better keep track of your organisation’s money.

What's Next : Fast track you automated expense or AP management

Luckily, you can fast track your move from manual to automated, one-off to streamlined, and at risk to at ease. Take a look at these helpful guides and find out how:

Expense automation guide or take our free trial of Concur Expense

Invoice automation guide

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