One Step Closer: How to Reach Your Finance Goals

Top of mind for many finance leaders is how do you keep a business profitable and viable? Setting strategic financial management goals is crucial as it provides a clear roadmap, fosters accountability and drives sustainable growth. Goal setting and how to achieve business goals, particularly in fluctuating market conditions and societal upheavals, is the difficult part.

While the challenges of cost containment, improved compliance and new hybrid working models probably do dominate a finance leader’s daily workload at the moment, they are still expected to play a key role in achieving longer-term financial success. 

Finance automation empowers Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Financial Directors (FDs) to tackle their daily challenges whilst simultaneously adding value and helping businesses achieve financial objectives including:

• Staying profitable
• Optimising productivity
• Recruiting and retaining the best talent
• Enabling sustainable growth
• Building resilience 
• Promoting agility and innovation
• Beating competitors and winning market share

By introducing finance automation, businesses can not only survive the rough patches but also reach their strategic potential.

But how to you achieve your financial goals?

 

Five Trends for CFOs to Watch

Learn the five trends that CFOs and finance leaders need to consider as they establish priorities for their finance team and their company in the near- and long-term.

See more

How Do You Stay Profitable?

It’s an obvious one but profitability must be at the top of any priority list. Here are three ways to reach your financial profitability goals:

• Manage costs, including controlling expenses, identifying areas of waste, renegotiating supplier contracts and streamlining processes. 
• Monitor key financial metrics to identify trends, evaluate performance and make data-driven decisions to improve profitability over time.
• Manage risk by identifying areas that could impact profitability, including regulatory changes. 

42% of finance leaders worldwide say tax compliance issues are a top pain point to automating. SAP Concur solutions helps finance decision makers control expense costs, run detailed AI-driven analytical reports and keep on top of tax regulations.  

How Do You Optimise Productivity?

Optimising productivity is an overriding goal that impacts every part of the business. Let’s look at three ways finance leaders can do more:

• Automate repetitive tasks such as receipt capture, expense reporting, data entry, financial reporting and analysis, to remove bottlenecks and free up time for more strategic activities. 
• Integrate financial systems for a holistic view of financial data to ensure accurate and up-to-date financial information.
• Offer mobile accessibility to allow employees to manage and approve expenses on-the-go, facilitating faster processing and reducing delays.

SAP Concur solutions give users mobile apps to manage their travel and expense tasks quickly and easily, whilst consolidating spend data from other financial systems including ERP, HR and CRM. 

How Do You Attract and Retain the Best Talent?

Finance leaders are looking to automation to do more of the tedious, manual work to help address talent shortages. Here are some of the ways they can do this:

• Automate expense management and invoice processing to ensure employees are fulfilled by more satisfying work.
• Boost compliance and policy enforcement with automated controls and validation rules, promoting transparency, control and consistency for employee peace of mind.
• Utilise advanced analytic tools that allow finance professionals to make informed decisions and contribute strategically to business success.

SAP Concur solutions empower talented finance professionals who value a technologically advanced and efficient work environment to remain compliant while offering advanced custom reporting tools that unlock strategic power.

How Do You Drive Sustainable Growth?

CFOs and FDs play a key role in using corporate finance and investment as a catalyst for sustainable growth and social impact. They can achieve this in several ways:

• Explore opportunities, evaluate potential risks and ensure that financial resources are allocated efficiently. 
• Harness automation and AI to collect data, provide audit trails and identify risks including regulatory compliance, reputation, supply chain resilience and environmental impact.  
• Promote a culture of continuous improvement by encouraging innovation, efficiency and cost optimisation to help reduce waste, optimise processes and enhance resource utilisation.

69% of companies worldwide believe T&E has improved their ability to make data-driven decisions. SAP Concur solutions support the long-term viability and growth of the organisation while considering environmental, social and governance factors. 

How Do You Build Resilience in a Business?

Finance leaders play a crucial role helping an organisation withstand and recover from various challenges and disruptions through their business resilience plans. Here are some ways finance leaders can reach these goals:

• Embrace technological advancements to streamline financial processes, enhance data accuracy and improve decision-making. 
• Establish an efficient cash flow forecasting process, closely monitor receivables and payables, optimise working capital and ensure access to sufficient liquidity. 
• Stay updated with relevant laws, regulations and accounting standards to avoid legal and financial risks.

SAP Concur solutions help financial decision makers build resilience by enabling better financial control, visibility, compliance, risk management and adaptability in the face of challenges.

How Do Finance Leaders Embrace Agility and Innovation?

With a constantly evolving business landscape, it's important to stay agile and adapt to changing market conditions. Finance leaders can support agility and innovation within their organisation in several ways:

• Foster an innovative culture by promoting communication, encouraging new ideas and rewarding fresh thinking. 
• Embrace technologies like AI, ML and data analytics to enhance decision-making and enable finance teams to focus on innovative strategies.
• Prioritise continuous learning and development for teams, including staying updated on emerging trends and best practices.

By breaking down data siloes and freeing up valuable time, SAP Concur solutions help CFOs and FDs lead their organisation towards becoming an intelligent enterprise.  

How Do You Beat Competitors and Win Market Share

Finance leaders can build market share and stay competitive through various strategies and initiatives. Here are some key approaches they can employ:

• Collaborate with strategic partners including fintech firms and technology providers to unlock business growth potential and improve competitiveness.
• Integrate with other financial systems for a comprehensive understanding of financial data, market trends and customer insights.
• Regularly monitor market trends, competitors and customer feedback to identify opportunities and adapt their strategies accordingly.

SAP Concur solutions has an extensive partner network and app ecosystem that helps finance teams get the best deals and drive competitiveness.

Beyond Finance to Future Growth Through Achieving Your Goals

As strategic partners, finance leaders have access to large amounts of data and bring a different perspective to the decision-making process. This puts them in a unique position to lead an organisation towards a stronger future and financial success.

If you need help on how to set financial goals for business SAP Concur solutions can take you one step closer. 

If you're looking for more guidance around this topic, check out our blog about how to write a Five Year Plan.

To see the solutions in action, try out a demo. And we’ve also put together some key advice on how to be successful in business for finance leaders by forging better relationships within their organisation, which you can read here.