You’re Ready for Recovery, But How Are You Going to Get There?

We all want things to get back to normal. Or the “new normal.” Or anywhere that allows us to focus on business again and forget that life isn’t always about chaos.  

But to find this road to recovery, you need to know where you are. That requires having an accurate picture of things like spending and budgets and invoices and all those other indicators of how your coffers are doing. Maybe you’ve got a good idea of these financial fundamentals already; maybe it could be better.  

Either way, if the data you’re relying on isn’t instant or accurate – in other words, digital – it isn’t going to help you much. And that begs the question:  

How agile is your information?  

When asked in a recent study, 93% of global finance, IT, operations, and other key strategy leaders agreed: Maintaining organisational agility is the only way to navigate uncertainty.  

You have to be able to roll with the punches, so to speak. And if you don’t have real-time information about your spending showing you where you stand when those punches come, well, you’re not going to be standing for long.  

So where do you start? How do you begin to capture the data that gives you a solid foundation and flexible footing? What do you need to close the information gaps that increase your costs and reduce compliance?  

Ninety percent of those same global executives say that a scalable, automated T&E management solution is key to controlling policy and protocol across the business.  

Ones, zeros, and other numbers

Travel and expense management isn’t merely about moving people from here to there to drum up business, it’s about efficiently moving data from here to there to manage business, so you can effectively drum up more. It’s about the numbers, because when you have an accurate picture of your spending –  the expense transactions, the invoices, the travel bookings  – you also have an accurate picture of your budget.  

And no matter how brilliant your finance team may be, they can’t make smart decisions (let alone quick decisions) if they don’t know how much money the company has or will have in the next month.  

Again, these numbers need to be accessible and, if possible, immediate. And again, that means going digital.  

You’ve probably already begun your digital transformation. But you’re not done yet

The road to recovery, whether in a post-pandemic world or any world, requires automated, accurate, and instant access to information. The executives in this study agree on that point, but the troubling statistic is that less than half of them feel “very prepared” to improve data analytics or increase automation.  

So if you’re not completely digital yet, you’re not alone.  

Travel, expense, and invoice management solutions are, however, a relatively simple way to gain control of a complex process. Using intelligent tech and analytics to automate (or further automate) what you’re currently doing, they bring more accuracy and control to your spending and, therefore, more savings to your bottom line.  

And that can bring considerably more calm to the recovery process.