Beat the Cost-of-Living Crisis with Strategic Business Spend Management

A perfect storm of inflation, the rising cost of living and the threat of recession on the horizon is putting finance and IT executives under increasing pressure to improve spend management efficiency.

This isn’t just day-to-day expense process efficiency and cost control using automation, which we covered in the first blog in this four-part series; it’s also the bigger picture, organisation-wide, strategic spend management.

By focusing on the importance of artificial intelligence and machine learning for business, you could turn these challenging times into a moment of opportunity.

Why is Business Spend Management Important in Times of Inflation?

With spending channels more fragmented than ever before, having a holistic grasp of your spending behaviours, including both expense, invoice and travel, is crucial as the cost of everything from petrol to food soars. 

Wasted time is wasted money. You want to ensure teams are spending time on high-value, innovative and strategic work. Complete visibility into spend is essential for eliminating wasted time and tightening your belt. 

By strategically aligning your spend policies with your business goals, you can optimise your resources, identify areas of more value-added spend and maximise cost control and compliance at a time when it’s needed most. You can also manage budgets proactively, reduce operational interruptions and improve the effectiveness of planning activities.

 

5 Steps to Strategic Spend Management

How is your company spending its money? In this Whitepaper, explore some of the smart ways to handle expenses and supplier invoices to protect the future growth of your organisation.

See more

What Do Businesses Need to Do Now?

It’s imperative to align business spend management with business goals, but to do this you need to obtain C-suite buy in. With all hands to the pump trying to cut costs and reduce employee stress, the argument for wider strategic measures might be a challenge in itself.

You also need to ensure collaboration and integration across departments. Everyone needs to be on board. Finance teams must adopt intelligent technologies tailored to the specific needs and legacy systems of organisations to unlock larger, competitive efficiency gains. This could include:

• Automated Expense, Travel and Invoice solutions
• Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning
• Analytic tools and dashboard-based reporting

74% of businesses worldwide say an automated spend management solution has helped reduce time spent on administrative tasks to focus on growth and strategic planning. But that’s just the beginning.

As outlined in this article, whilst a spend management strategy may lead to the replacement of the human element with AI tools,  71% of UK executives say the increased use of AI and machine learning provides opportunities to increase efficiency and productivity.

The decision to introduce AI and other intelligent automation technologies to improve spend management could improve performance, consistency and efficiency across the business. It also frees up your employees to focus on the more rewarding, value-add tasks that keep them engaged and help drive your business through tough times.

How Can SAP Concur Solutions Help?

Digital transformation is key to withstanding turbulent times, but careful consideration is needed when selecting the technology to get you there. 

With SAP Concur solutions, you can make seismic shifts to how spend is managed across your organisation, with:

• Dynamic data

Instead of just an image of a hard copy, Concur Expense, Concur Travel and Concur Invoice give you live, detailed data pulled from invoices and receipts or delivered directly from suppliers and corporate cards. 

• Intelligent technology

SAP Concur solutions can use all that data to do more of the work for you – populating expense reports; feeding into your accounting system; and using AI and machine learning to apply your policies, flag what needs your attention and keep the process moving without taking up your time. 

• Single connected digital workflows

SAP Concur solutions manage the process from beginning to end. Everything from capturing expense charges and invoices as they come in through paying suppliers and reimbursing employees is connected in a single, digital workflow – eliminating the gaps that expose risks and add delays. 

• Work anywhere spend management

With SAP Concur solutions you can integrate data from anywhere, more important now than ever with hybrid working here to stay. Mobile apps allow spend to be captured and processed from any location, saving time and reducing errors and late payments.

The Big Picture

By controlling spend on an organisation-wide scale, you have a better chance of reducing errors, waste and fraud. Pulling together live, real-time data and allowing AI and intelligent technologies to maximise visibility and control, gives you the power to combat rising costs.

With SAP Concur solutions you benefit from an ecosystem of best-in-class technology partners which will help you build business resilience and secure your future, a topic we’ll be exploring in the last in our four-part Cost-of-Living Crisis blog series.

To find out more about the importance of collaboration and intelligent technologies in times of economic crisis, and insight into how this could benefit your business, read this eBook.