Adopting Spend Automation to Maximize Your New Funding

When your business gets a new infusion of cash, you have a good problem on your hands. Many a business faces the dilemma of how to spend their new funding. There’s often a strong case for investing in everything from new equipment to new talent to replacing worn-out office furniture. The list goes on, and before you know it, that money can quickly get spent.

That’s why you want to prioritize your spending in ways that will give you the greatest return. So how do you get the most mileage from your funding? By managing it better from the start.

Let’s look at some ways you can digitally transform your finance process to make your funding work better for you.

How does spend management automation work?

Digitizing and automating spend – such as employee expenses, vendor invoices, and travel costs – can give your business a stronger foundation to help ensure future growth and resilience. Digital transformation is also a major priority for businesses of all sizes – to make sure operations run better, employees work more productively, and get better control of cash flow.

Furthermore, many companies are looking for digital innovation solutions with faster implementation times, especially as they seek faster ROI and digitization wins.

Automation is a broad – and sometimes misunderstood – concept. You can get a basic understanding here of How AI and ML Automation Solutions Solve Business Problems.

When it comes to automating your finance process, this guide, 6 Ways to Grow Your Business with Spend Management Automation, shows how to maximize automation and remove the gaps for spend to fall through and get ahead of your cash flow.

And keep in mind: Your competitors are thinking about digital transformation and automation, too. See Five Trends for CFOs to Watch to see what’s top priority for businesses and their finance leaders.

Do you really need to automate your spend management?

Even if you have processes in place for managing finance tasks, do you know how well they can support you as your business evolves?

The first step to determining how well your company’s spend management process is actually working is using this Controls and Compliance Financial Fitness Scorecard to make a quick assessment of where your business stands and how it could improve.

Using data for smarter decision-making

Today’s businesses are embracing more data-driven decision-making. Automation can give you the tools to improve business intelligence and gain actionable insights.

When charting the path for your new funding, it helps to use tools to make contingency plans for strategies to weather uncertainty, strengthen your working capital, improve company spend visibility, and find cost-saving opportunities. See 6 Strategies for Finance Resiliency via Digital Transformation to learn more.

Get greater transparency into spending

Gaining greater transparency into your spend – for internal tracking as well as for any reporting you might need to provide to stakeholders outside of the business – is key to seeing where you stand and how you can rein in costs.

In Oxford Economics Global + US Report: Leadership in a New Era, business leaders who were surveyed reported seeing increased visibility into spend, better cash flow management, greater cost savings, and improved financial forecasting after digitizing the business finance process.

Finding the right tools can help you better leverage business analytics to ensure travel and expense policy compliance, improve budgeting, forecasting, and more. See Reports You Need Without Spending Time You Don’t Have to learn more.

Ways to ensure compliance

Staying on top of compliance can be challenging, but it’s key to maintaining control over your spending and reducing errors and fraud. It’s also crucial to staying within business regulations and staying in alignment on any business agreements you may have.

Now is the time to review where you stand on spending policy and fraud reduction. Use this tip sheet, Top Tips to Build A Culture of Compliance, to consider the policies and processes that keep your bottom line in line while protecting your company and its people.

Roughly 20% of expenses fall out of policy. Think about how much that can impact your bottom line – and eat into your new funding. But strengthening your expense policy and communicating it properly are the first steps to getting that under control. Start with this easy-to-use Expense Policy Template. You’ll also want to review your vendor invoice policy, and this Invoice Policy Template can help.

And finally – organizations lose an estimated 5% of revenue to fraud each year. So, you definitely want to nip that in the bud. See our short guide Fending Off Fraud for ways to reduce fraud.

What's the ROI on spend management automation?

When it comes to investing your new funding, the big question, of course, is: How soon will this pay off?

Many companies are realizing that they’ll see faster ROI with solutions they can get up and running faster. Check out this case study, Gallagher Rolls out SAP Concur Solutions in Two Weeks, to learn more.

In a 2022 survey by Analysys Mason, companies saw, on average, positive ROI within 8 months after implementing a travel and expense and/or vendor invoice management solution. Check out this infographic, Automating Finance on the Way to Digital Transformation, to see how much companies have saved by automating their travel, expense, and vendor invoice management.

Want to see what your company’s ROI could be? Try the ROI Calculator for Companies and Employee Expense Management and Concur Invoice ROI Calculator.

Ready to invest in your business with spend management solutions? Let’s chat