Growth and Optimization
Five Ways to Make Your Business Unshakeable
All businesses owners are having to think more flexibly than ever, to respond to challenges and adapt to ever-shifting goalposts. You’ve become more inventive, more reactive and able to improvise, alongside a prevailing spend wisdom of tighter budgets and scattered workforces. It’s not surprising, therefore, that a company’s ability to generate cash for short term financial stability still remains the number one focus for many, with only 33% of UK SMBs seeing increasing financial visibility into cash flow as a critical tactic for future-proofing their business.
So how can you ensure you have the right spend management processes and policies in place to secure the future of your business in a variety of situations and changing circumstances?
1. Control Shifting Spend
As your business spend increases and new methods of spending emerges, how confident are you that your existing processes are agile enough to still deliver the cost savings and cash control you need?
Creating a flexible, simple way to keep costs under control and keep cash flowing to the right places with the right automated spend management solution allows you to capitalise on new opportunities. An integrated, expandable solution enables you to adapt as your business needs evolve and scale as your business grows. With the right spend solution, you can stay flexible whilst making strategic, well-informed decisions.
2. Let Apps Do the Work
An app-based solution offers you an additional opportunity to eliminate costly mistakes, audit expenses efficiently and put payment controls in place for compliance, so you can feel confident that risk is mitigated. It will do the hard work for your employees and approvers, particularly when they are on the go. Relieving the frustration of entering expenses manually in their free time, it makes it easier for them to be accurate, to comply with company spend policy and keep them focussed on their own role, boosting productivity. The right solution should offer them a modern, high-quality experience that fosters adoption and increases value, increasing employee satisfaction.
3. Streamline Old Processes
The right spend management solution will replace paperwork, so it’s easier for your employees and finance teams to stay compliant and reduce the chance of risks. It should automate and integrate all the steps to manage spend, allowing you and your team freedom from complicated processes. By connecting expense and travel data in one solution, you can accelerate processes and facilitate better insights. At their best, IT solutions should drive agility in your business, helping to reduce costs and complexity for your organisation, and increase value.
4. Manage Spend Ahead of Time
Trying to fund innovation for tomorrow whilst growing your core business on a day-to-day basis can be a challenge. A good spend management solution will help you manage spending before it happens, and give you total spend visibility, ensuring you always get the most out of your budget now, whilst you plan for the future. Improved reporting accuracy to give you a more holistic view of your cash flow will help you stay on top of costs and cash, allowing you to move quickly when making financial decisions. When you gain timely insights from your data, you can quickly adjust to customer needs and changing market conditions, helping to futureproof your business.
5. Keep It Agile
Restrictions and requirements are likely to ebb and flow for some time; the need for travel is going to continue to vary, so business travel is liable to be a complex area for the foreseeable future. It’s also essential to ensure you adequately equip your business travellers. Your duty of care includes making sure they’re up to date with the latest information so they can make the right choices and adapt if a situation changes.
Ready to Move Forward
The right solution will help prepare your business to meet new challenges – ensuring the strategic changes you made to keep your business moving over the last year don’t hold you back but enable you to be ready for spending to flow again.
SAP Concur solutions work seamlessly together on a single, unified platform, to give full visibility of your financial spend. We can help you make leaps in strategy, process efficiency and technology to fit the new spending and travel reality. You can fulfil your duty of care whilst you ensure compliance and cost management, effectively covering you from all angles and futureproofing your business.
With solid processes in place, you can spend wisely whilst you develop your strategy and secure your future.
To learn more about how SAP Concur solutions can help make your business unshakeable and keep you moving forward, whatever happens next, take a look at our tools on digitising spend processes.