Employee Experience
How Can Finance Automation Drive Big Wins with Small Actions?
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The pressures you’re facing today can feel overwhelming but this isn’t the time to drag your heels or wait and see before leaping into action. Business finance automation will help you take the initial steps to improve productivity and performance and face these challenges head on. By making improvements to back-office spend management processes you are better equipped to tackle inflation, overcome talent shortages, navigate hybrid working and manage disrupted supply chains. In this blog we’ll highlight the straightforward, incremental changes you can make today through business financial automation to improve decision-making processes, speed up workflows, make spend more visible and, ultimately, create happier employees and a more compliant, cost-effective business. Table of Contents
What are the Key Financial Challenges Facing Businesses Today?Let’s begin by addressing what might seem the insurmountable challenges that businesses face. Here are a few of the most common roadblocks:
It’s important to overcome these roadblocks and take a longer-term view. Spend management is about so much more than just identifying what’s being spent so that you can simply spend less or more wisely. It’s also about:
So, how can you achieve these goals? How Can You Achieve Business Goals with Business Finance Automation?With business finance automation these roadblocks become much more surmountable. Let’s look at three actions you can take now to overcome them.
The bottom line is that in times of economic hardship, costs need to be reduced. This doesn’t have to be a dramatic reduction in staff, a closing of physical offices or a ruthless clampdown on all employee benefits. There are measures that don’t impact the employee experience or productivity – they improve them. So how can you reduce costs and maintain quality? Here are some pointers to get you started: Prevent misspend and overspend – acting before money goes out the door is the best way to control costs. Use a solution that identifies non-compliant spend in near real time, so you don’t have to worry about missing costly mistakes. With SAP Concur solutions, businesses saw 65% more compliant expense reports submitted. Collect and understand previously siloed data – for maximum impact, a spend management process must span every corner of your business. Collect and detect previously siloed data by integrating travel and expense data with your ERP, HR and CRM software for a more comprehensive view of spend and a more holistic approach to managing it. Businesses using SAP Concur solutions for example report $777,000 annual savings on business travel and expenses. Eliminate all waste and leakage – even the smallest, accidental slip ups add up over time. Use a reporting dashboard to analyse historical data and identify repeat over spenders, track errors and tell the difference between misuse, accidents and fraud. Outsource audit tasks to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning programs to free up time for more strategic work. 82% of finance and IT leaders say analytics and reporting dashboards are helpful in overcoming challenges to meeting their function’s goals. Stay up to date with changing tax regulations by region and country – this can be a complex task but there are tools which all the hard work for you. Maximise VAT reclaim using AI and machine learning algorithms to navigate the intricate process of identifying tax credits for recapture to maximise your returns. 35% of finance and IT executives cite tax policy changes related to VAT/GST reclaim as a challenge to keeping employees in compliance. Keep track of invoices and speed up payment – now is a great time to improve supplier relationships, secure discounts and avoid late payment fees. Keep track of invoices by automatically sorting scanning and verifying them and digitise the accounts payable process to reduce processing time, increase efficiency and improve accuracy. For more detailed examples of how to cut costs and boost compliance read our Priority Checklist, a four-part action plan to making small changes for big wins.
Increasingly employees want more meaningful work and demand tools that empower them to work more efficiently. This is true across the organisation, from the finance team who manage budgets to the employee who needs to submit expense claims, book travel and pay suppliers as part of their everyday routine. It’s no surprise that improving the employee experience is a strategic priority for 27% of IT and finance leaders. Employee experience is one of the first things to improve with business finance automation. Start with these action points and watch the benefits unfold: Eliminate delays, duplicated work and frustrating manual processes – nobody wants to waste other people’s time, be left waiting for approvals or reimbursement or spend their days chasing up missing invoices, especially when there’s more important strategic work to be done. Eliminate the bottlenecks by automating manual tasks and creating integrations with other financial systems to smooth the flow of data and approvals. Businesses using SAP Concur solutions see a 50% reduction in reimbursement times. Enable a work-from-anywhere culture – by moving to a cloud-based spend management system you empower employees to submit expense reports, book and manage their travel and process invoices from anywhere. For example, mobile apps enable employees to capture images of receipts and automatically populate expense reports, speeding up the process. The mobile features of SAP Concur solutions mean that users take 43% less time to fill out an expense report. Introduce intuitive user interfaces – employees don’t want to replace manual tasks with complicated digital processes. Offer a seamless, mobile experience that takes the frustration out of simple tasks and includes ongoing support and automated reminders and notifications. Businesses reported a 36% more efficient expense report intake and handling and 54% less time to book business trip with SAP Concur solutions. For a rundown of the importance of streamlining your back-office processes and a look at how smaller, incremental changes can bolster employee productivity, business performance and engagement, read our Time to Act solutions sheet.
The small, incremental improvements we recommend you take today aren’t just to ensure you stay afloat now, they’re also designed to build a more robust, financially secure business tomorrow. By investing in finance automation solutions, streamlining processes and reducing inefficiencies, you lay the foundations for a business that can remain stable during any storm. Start by addressing the action points below: Build resilience to withstand future downturns – by installing a culture of compliance, embedding policy-adherence into your processes and using intelligent reporting tools to analyse and predict spending behaviour you can help build resilience. It’s about identifying new patterns to help inform policies to guide future spending. With SAP Concur solutions, 32% more employees follow company travel and expense policies. Adapt to future pressures, societal changes and employee demands – by surfacing unseen patterns and creating risk profiles using AI and machine learning, your business can continuously adapt to changing circumstances. With better insights, your finance team is well equipped to move forward with creative solutions to optimise travel and expense costs. 82% of finance and IT leaders say using analytics and reporting dashboards are helpful in overcoming challenges to meeting their function’s goals. Make faster business-critical decisions – connecting travel and spend data sources improves the decision-making process by empowering your employees with quality information. This allows them to be more analytical when identifying areas for improvement and solving challenges. Integrating travel and expense solutions with financial systems provides near real-time insights into spending so your business can be more agile and responsive to change. Grow into new markets and regions – reclaiming VAT is a complex and difficult process to manage, especially as tax rules and regulations differ by region and are in constant flux. With manual processes, your business is at risk for audit issues and the loss of unclaimed tax. An automated approach handles the complexity of each countries’ tax regulations with greater accuracy and speed than human auditors. For a more in-depth look at how to fuel future growth by making small changes to spend management processes read our Making Time for More Meaningful Work eBook. Small Changes Today, Big Impact TomorrowBy making small, incremental changes to your back-office finance processes, you can alleviate a lot of the pressures, concerns and stresses that hold your business and your employees back, whilst building resilience. SAP Concur solutions is key to these changes, helping you identify core spending patterns, take corrective action and replace clunky, manual finance processes with more cost-efficient and compliant ones. The lessons learnt today about how to cut costs and improve employee experience have the potential to lead you to greater resilience and agility whatever the economic circumstances – and long-term success. Ready for action? Let’s recap on some of the ways we can help you makes these small but important changes. Check out these useful resources.
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