Growth and Optimization
Six Tips to Maximise Business Performance with Finance Automation
Knowledge is power. Time is of the essence. These are both overused phrases but when it comes to reducing costs and automating manual finance tasks to boost business performance, both are true.
With increasing economic and societal pressures, the complexity of employee spending behaviours and more stringent travel booking and approval processes, it’s a good time to look at automating manual tasks. This should first involve reviewing your financial strategy and working out where you could make improvements.
But how do you gauge the success of your financial strategy in order to plot the best course of action? A good place to start is to benchmark
your financial processes against others and, where necessary, implement best-in-class finance automation solutions that harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. This gives you an opportunity to increase productivity and profitability throughout your business.
By using business finance automation to streamline and speed-up your processes, your employees can carry out even the smallest actions in a more efficient, accurate and fast way – and more importantly, your business gains a clearer insight into and control over employee spend.
This blog will guide you through six tips to maximise business performance with finance automation.
- Be Faster – Approve and Process Expenses in Less Time
- Be More Efficient – Ensure Correct Submission of Reports First Time
- Be More Accurate – Catch Human Errors Quickly with Higher Receipt Viewership
- Be More Compliant – Reduce Fraud and Reclaim More Tax
- Be More Mobile – Equip Employees with Intuitive Tools
- Be More Controlled – Reconcile All Payments and Increase Card Usage
How Can You Reduce Cost and Maintain Quality?
Travel and Expense processes consist of multiple parts, such as submitting, approving, auditing, reimbursing and reporting. If any step is not functioning optimally, it can have a cascading impact on business performance.
Identifying where you are now and where you want to be is the crucial first step. This means taking a close look at each element of your finance process and benchmarking it against others. Only by knowing what you’re not doing optimally can you take action to achieve more.
Which leads us to what’s possible. According to IDC, with SAP Concur solutions you can benefit from $777K savings on business travel and expense-related costs, 5.3 months to payback on investment and a three-year ROI of 628%.
So, what actions can your business take to get there?
Six Ways to DO MORE with Finance Automation
It’s important to assess where you sit on the digital transformation journey before working out which improvements are required. By identifying your starting point, and any weaknesses or gaps in financial processes, you can plan the next steps to achieve greater speed, efficiency, accuracy, compliance, flexibility and control.
1. Be Faster – Approve and Process Expenses in Less Time
Begin by identifying a starting point with our assessment, which asks important questions such as “Does your system automatically populate expense reports with electronic receipts from airline, hotel, car rental and other suppliers?” to establish how digitally mature your business is.
What’s the risk of inaction?
Without finance automation, manual processes cause lost receipts, approval lags, rekeying errors, slow payroll reimbursement and frustrated employees.
How does finance automation improve business performance?
By moving away from manual processes with solutions such as Concur Expense, Concur Travel, Expense Pay and Concur Request, you will enjoy a number of benefits including:
Easy – auto population of credit card charges, digital receipts, itineraries on mobile apps for more productive employees.
Fast – on-time and on-the-go submitting, approval and reimbursement, resulting in less wasted time.
Trusted – accountability and reassurance for both managers and employees with pre-approvals, estimated costs, cash advances, built in policy checks and alerts and improved metrics.
Reward for taking action: With SAP Concur solutions, you can experience a 50% reduction in the time to reimburse expenses and average approval and processing times can be reduced from nine days to five days.
2. Be More Efficient - Ensure Correct Submission of Reports First Time
Begin by identifying a starting point with our assessment, which asks important questions such as “Where are you now?” and “Does your system automatically check 100% of expense reports before reimbursement happens?”
What’s the risk of inaction?
Manual processes usually mean keying errors, poor checking and insufficient training, causing receipts to fail first time which means they must be returned to the audit team for correction, flagged for exception reporting or sent to the appointed processor for review.
How does finance automation improve business performance?
By utilising reporting solutions such as Intelligence and Consultative Intelligence you can discover which Concur Expense policies are causing the issues, while Intelligent Audit and Concur Detect by Oversight give you visibility into what’s happening, leading to the following benefits:
Expert – every detail is checked by a fully trained approver to discover which policies are causing the most report send backs.
Timely – employees are paid on time without delay.
Consistent – every report that fails the checks is sent back with advice on next steps and individual users/groups are identified for additional training.
Reward for taking action: With SAP Concur solutions your business can experience 36% more efficient expense report intake and handling. It can also increase instances of report sent back from 13.09% to 15-20% and decrease instances of audit failure from 24.07% to 15-20%.
3. Be More Accurate - Catch Human Errors Quickly with Higher Receipt Viewership
Begin by identifying a starting point with our assessment, which asks important questions such as “Does your system automatically populate
expense reports with electronic receipts from airline, hotel, car rental and other suppliers?”
What’s the risk of inaction?
Misplaced trust, lack of time or insufficient training can cause a low rate of receipt viewership, which is the process of checking receipts against every expense line.
How does finance automation improve business performance?
ExpenseIt uses OCR technology and machine learning to automatically read, itemise, and categorise expenses from a receipt photo while Intelligent Audit checks 100% of claims to increase receipt viewership and speed up processing and accuracy, for the following benefits:
Thorough – every expense line has an associated valid receipt, made easier by mobile apps that take photos of receipts straightaway or forward digital receipts.
Stringent – 100% of receipts are audited for policy and VAT compliance (or reclaim), receipt substantiation and fraud/anomaly patterns.
Unbiased – advice from an experienced audit team on how to update and manage your receipt viewership policies.
Reward for taking action: With SAP Concur solutions, finance and compliance teams can experience up to a 43% reduction in lost receipts. They can also double the instances of receipt viewership from 40% to 85%.
4. Be More Compliant - Reduce Fraud and Reclaim More Tax
Begin by identifying a starting point with our assessment, which asks important questions such as “Does your system integrate with third party apps that help to track spend or value-add tax (VAT)?”
What’s the risk of inaction?
Complexity and lack of expertise leads to receipts remaining unchecked and the opportunity for VAT reclaim being squandered.
How does finance automation improve business performance?
Concur Tax Assurance by Blue dot helps organisations comply with global tax regulations, digitising the compliance process and maximising recovery for benefits including:
Intuitive – dashboards enable users to drill down to transaction-level data, to more easily understand the errors that caused a claim to be disqualified.
Detailed – clarify receipts with differing VAT rates, separating items such as food and parking, for example.
Compliant – automatically adhere to constantly shifting country-specific regulations.
Reward for taking action: With SAP Concur solutions businesses can more than halve the amount of VAT disqualification from 49.7% to 20% and see 65% more compliant expense reports and 32% more employees following T&E policies.
5. Be More Mobile – Equip Employees with Intuitive Tools
Begin by identifying a starting point with our assessment, which asks important questions such as “Does your system allow employees to take pictures of receipts and submit expenses from a mobile device, or plan business trips and manage itineraries from a mobile device?”
What’s the risk of inaction?
Errors, delays and missed claims occur when expenses are submitted from desktop computers or employees forget to use mobile tools.
How does finance automation improve business performance?
The SAP Concur mobile app captures receipts and helps you convert paper receipts into legal digital receipts as well as letting you submit and approve expense reports for the following benefits:
Mobile first – every employee can submit and approve expense and travel wherever and whenever they like.
Digital – receipts are read and captured using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, which determines type of expense, amount etc.
Satisfied – employees are freed up for more value-add work and are reimbursed faster.
Reward for taking action: With SAP Concur solutions businesses can double mobile adoption from 24.01% to 50%, helping to reduce the time to book a business trip by 54% and fill out an expense report by 43%.
6. Be More Controlled – Reconcile All Payments and Increase Card Usage
Begin by identifying a starting point with our assessment, which asks important questions such as “Does your finance team manually reconcile paper or spreadsheet-based expense reports?”
What’s the risk of inaction?
The ease and familiarity of using personal cards for low value purchases, lack of training or simply not having a corporate card can lead to high processing fees and reduced visibility into spending.
How does finance automation improve business performance?
Company Bill Statements (CBS) centralises the purchase card process in Concur Expense to automate and reconcile P-card expenses offering increased visibility across all spend categories, with benefits including:
Card first – every employee has a corporate card and is mandated to use it for hotels, air and car spend.
Reconciliation – details of the company card expenditure are auto-populated so that accurate, reconcilable data flows into the expense management platform.
Stress free – employees don’t have to use their own funds or risk being out of pocket.
Reward for taking action: With SAP Concur solutions businesses can increase the proportion of credit card payments compared to cash, from a 60/40 split to a 20/80 split.
Keep Reaching for Improved Business Performance
Taking each spend management process apart and benchmarking them against others helps you refine business decisions and improve business performance.
Best-in-class finance automation solutions integrate spend data from all parts of your organisation. This gives employees a better experience and provides leaders with the insights they need to maximise the strategic decision-making process.
This provides a critical advantage, especially during challenging times. It also helps you maximise profitability and reach your business goals, both now and in the future.