Control Your Compliance: Go from “Good” to “Great”
From over or underspending on VAT, to finding menial errors within expense reports – ensuring your spend management is in tip top shape is crucial to sailing through the audit process. In the audit world – compliance is key. With SAP Concur solutions, you can utilise automation to make sure your business is staying compliant and following policies efficiently. On top of this, it uncovers any costs your company is paying out on non-compliant spend and the risk it brings them to give you maximum visibility.
In a recent webinar, Emily Gosling from SAP Concur, cuts through the noise to outline some good compliance tips - and some even better ones - so you can stay ahead of the game and pass your audits with flying colours.
Three GOOD Compliance Practices
Did you know, 43% of senior finance leaders are very concerned about HMRC inspections?1 So, making sure your company is compliant across the board should be a top priority.
1.Set Your Policies in Stone
Whatever your business goals are, it’s key to make sure your employees stick to policies in the most effective way possible. You don’t want to be seen as micro-managing but at the same time you don’t want to let any non-compliancy slip through the cracks.
In order to do this in effectively, first make sure you have strong, clear policies that employees can use and refer to when submitting expenses. Help clamp down on spending by setting out guidelines that state exactly what compliant and non-compliant spend looks like in your business. Make sure your policy document is user friendly and allows people to find what they need quickly.
2.Set a Main Point of Contact
To ensure questions regarding your policy are answered by the right person, add a point of contact (an email and a phone number) so employees know who to ask. A pro tip would be to use a generic email for the department, rather than a single person having sole responsibility. This guarantees queries can be responded to more efficiently if someone is on holiday or has a heavy workload.
3.Provide Ongoing Support
You can outsource your support functionality to User Support Desk, which gives direct access to
SAP Concur consultants who are familiar with your solution and configuration. This allows employees to get answers straight away, mitigating the risk of non-compliance as well as saving time that is usually spent doing these administration tasks in-house.
This function is particularly useful for companies with offices in different time zones, as those employees can still get support as and when they need it. On top of this, Concur Audit provides end-user support 24/7.
Three GREAT Compliance Practices
Once you feel confident your company is following good processes, it’s time to take them even further with these best-in-class practices.
1.Start as You Mean to Go On
In order to make sure policy is being followed by all employees from the outset, audit 100% of employees for the first 90 days to six months to ensure they understand your policies and are being compliant with all expense submissions. After the set time period has passed, let them know that they will still be regularly audited, in line with your standard policy.
2.Build Compliance into Solutions
55% of employees either don’t know what the policy contains – or that it even exists[1] – so using an automated solution such as Concur Expense and Concur Travel will allow you to build compliance into the process. This eliminates the need to constantly consult policy documents as you can build rules within the system to remind them along the way. For example, when an end user is submitting cash expenses, you can set rules to ask them to submit their receipts alongside this.
When using Concur Travel, you can remind employees to use corporate cards over their own when booking their trips, which will provide data that gives a more granular view into company spend and where that money is going.
3.Review Spend Through Audit
You can use SAP Concur solutions to outsource auditing which can help halt non-compliance.
Concur Audit gives you access to a team of skilled, qualified auditors who will audit every line of expense and highlight where there is non-compliance.
Once you send your SAP Concur Client Engagement Executive the travel & expense policies, they can identify what needs auditing in order to highlight non-compliant spend. They will take sections of company policies and turn them into questions that auditors must answer in order for an expense claim to be approved.
Implementing these audit rules can be done at any point in your expense process but a pro tip is to implement them after the expenses have been claimed by the end user, but before they are approved by management.
With 78% of finance leaders saying they aren’t completely confident that managers thoroughly check every claim submitted by employees[2], not only will this save time for the line manager but it will also give you peace of mind that expenses have already been pre-approved by Concur Audit.
Now You’re Ready for Greatness
Even just by following good practices, you can be confident that your company will be more compliant. But by incorporating great practices, you can be assured that all of your employees are following company policy whilst streamlining your spend management processes to minimise non-compliancy.