How Cloud Technology Helps Media Businesses Manage Their Money

In media businesses, people are the most valuable assets. It’s people who make and break the news, who package, present and distribute the content, who sell the advertising, manage subscriptions and circulation.

Those people can be travelling frequently – both locally and globally – so you need to keep a handle on their travel and expense spend. However, media businesses are often made up of lots of different internal units, each working in its own way. So, getting a centralised view of spend can be problematic, especially if different units use different systems that don’t talk to each other.

Another issue for media companies – in a world of clickbait, data farming and fake news – is reputation. Reputational integrity is vital to success, so evidence of protections against financial fraud and non-compliance are essential.

How Technology Can Help

All of these challenges for the media sector have one thing in common: the right technological solution can help address them, easily and effectively. Here’s how….

Challenge: Expenses on the Go

One of the easiest ways to make sure people submit accurate and timely expenses is to make it effortless. For people who are often travelling, it needs to be doable on the go. Plus, mobile users demonstrate a 91% compliance rate for travel and expense policies, compared with 59% for their non-mobile peers (Aberdeen Group).

With the SAP Concur mobile app, employees can use their smartphones to snap pictures of their receipts and immediately upload them. No more hoarding wads of paper or wasting time completing expense claims on their return. Approvers can sign off claims while on the move too, which means you get visibility into what they’re spending, sooner.

Challenge: Decentralised Spending

Being able to see and report on spend across your company from a single place – even when your business units use different legacy systems – can help you accrue, budget, spot spending patterns and control costs effectively, before they get out of hand.

“SAP Concur is an efficient tool and the information you can get out of it is fantastic! It's a great benefit for the finance team to have visibility and control over millions of pounds worth of expense claims.”

Colomba Ferraro – Accounts Manager, Hearst Magazines

With SAP Concur, you don’t need to manually input data to different systems. Instead, travel and expense data captured in the mobile or desktop application is consolidated as accurate and timely information for finance teams. You can configure your solution to match your travel and expense policy too, so out-of-policy spend is not just straightforward to detect – but easier to prevent in the first place.

Challenge: Protecting Your Reputation

To help you mitigate reputational risk, SAP Concur offers an industry-leading solution with best practices and robust workflows built in. Because our apps make it simple for employees to book travel and submit expenses, you get more accurate data from day one, and an audit trail for every employee-initiated transaction. Plus, if needed, the SAP Concur audit team can provide objectivity, multi-language support, and quick turnaround for expense claim reviews.

Finally, automated solutions help businesses access centralised data so they can report accurately on spend, both internally as well as externally to HMRC. This level of insight and control makes enforcing company policies much easier too, as you can identify problem areas and take corrective action much sooner.

Once you have robust spend management processes in place, and the troublesome task of managing money is done for you, it’s much easier for you and your employees to get back to breaking news.

To find out more about SAP Concur, visit our website.