What does the future of spend management look like?

Effective spend management strategies play a crucial role in improving the bottom line. They help you redirect savings to enable business growth — strategies might include making your procurement and sourcing more efficient or instilling accountable spending habits.

We all know the importance of spend management, but with the technology landscape constantly evolving, what does the future of spend management look like? And how can these advancements help you improve your financial team?

The challenges of spend management

41% of companies still rely on manual expense management. This is a practice draining financial team resources. But aside from time-intensive (and manually-draining) tasks like these, there are all kinds of obstacles facing modern-day CFOs.

We spoke with finance expert Yura Kropelnytskiy from Softjourn, who highlighted that although the future of spend management is promising, it’s also challenging.

Yura says, “the biggest obstacles [to spend management] include outdated tools, a volatile economy, hybrid and remote workforces, corporate buying, and digital tax management. However, innovative solutions such as automation, AI, and machine learning capabilities can give companies a competitive edge and help them future-proof.”

To better equip your financial team and your organization for the future, you need to know what’s out there that can make your job a whole lot easier.

Automation and AI have become more prevalent

Every industry now utilizes automation in some capacity. And why wouldn’t they? It cuts down time spent on menial tasks, enabling you to focus on more add-value tasks such as resource allocation, budget planning and forecasting and driving real business growth.

When used correctly, AI can be a powerful tool, too. Let’s take spending patterns as an example. Being able to identify spending patterns quickly is something AI can help you with, but machine learning takes it one step further — it can make recommendations on where you can save money.

Smart suggestions like this can help you reallocate budget immediately to areas of spending that will help you reach your financial and overarching business goals.

AI also plays an important role when keeping your business safe from fraud. Without accountability through a digital expense management system, employees can easily commit expense fraud, costing organizations money each year.

Automation can detect expense fraud by matching receipts with expenses filed and ensuring all employees uploading expenses adhere to your digital expense policy guidelines.

There’s no space for disparate systems

Legacy systems make spend management unnecessarily fragmented, and managing spend is a process that requires complete visibility. That means you don’t need multiple systems, creating duplicate or disconnected data. You need reliable systems to oversee spend, confidently forecast and accurately budget.

As organizations grow, their structure gets more complex, making managing company spend even more challenging. Different teams and individuals have different spending requirements, and before you know it, you’ve got 100 subscriptions, 70% of which you no longer use.

A single centralized spend management platform helps you keep track of all spend, no matter how small. Everything is accounted for.

The way we work requires cloud-based systems

The pandemic has sped up the need for modern technology in every industry. With employees now working from home or a mix of home and office, systems need to be able to deliver results from anywhere.

If you need to pull together a future forecasting report for shareholders, you need to be able to access reliable data quickly. And with a cloud-based system, you can do that.

The tech is no longer stored and accessed as a program on your computer, instead, with one login, you have all the significant financial projections at your fingertips. Pull together reports quickly, cast an eye over projections, See which subscriptions are defunct, and see how teams are allocated budgets.

Still not sure whether cloud-based is for you? According to recent data, enterprise cloud spending is set to increase by 14% in 2024 — it’s on everyone’s agendas, which means it should be a priority for you, too.

Access to real-time data means smarter decisions

Every decision you make as CFO ultimately impacts the bottom line, so you should tread carefully when making them. But armed with reliable and accurate data in real-time can help you make smarter decisions faster.

But what does real-time financial data really mean?

• Gain complete visibility into business performance metrics

• Collect and organize expense data to accurately recover VAT

• Reduce operational costs by monitoring market conditions in real-time

• Maintain accurate invoice records to make use of invoice financing

• Find patterns in data making your responses proactive

• Optimize spend habits and gain financial transparency to improve creditworthiness
  
  

Ultimately, real-time data means you’re more informed about every aspect of the business.

There are no hidden costs — everything is out in the open. This gives you a greater chance of competing while redistributing costs, negotiating with suppliers, adopting a proactive approach to business spend management, and improving cash flow.

Spenfi features to transform your spend management

Our platform is designed to help you improve operational efficiencies and provide the detailed spending insights you need to support strategic business decisions.

From quickly assigning virtual and real-life cards to giving employees the freedom to spend within a digital expense policy, what else can Spenfi offer?

• Access 4x better FX rates with our multi-currency accounts

• Never miss a bill payment with our approval, pay and track features

• Issue company cards and keep a close eye on all spending with spend notifications

• And much more.