8 Reasons Why You Need to Connect Expense, Travel, and Invoice Spend

If you've considered automating your expense, travel, and invoice management processes, you're on the right track to improving your bottom line. One major benefit to automating with cloud-based software is the ability to connect your data in one location. Wondering why that's so important? Here are eight reasons why your business will benefit by getting connected:

1. Connected spend gives you visibility and control.

Being able to see and report on company-wide spend from a single place can help you accrue, budget, spot spending patterns, and control costs effectively before they get out of hand.

2. Connected spend helps you make better decisions.

Expense, travel, and invoice spend are often handled separately by different teams. Implementing simple processes that connect into a single system helps you to report on employee spend - wherever it happens, whenever you need it - to make more informed business decisions.

3. Connected spend drives business efficiency.

Automating expense, travel, and invoice processes can cut the time employees spend on administrative tasks and reduce data-entry errors. If you have one comprehensive system, employees don't have to spend time learning a different tool for every process.

4. Connected spend helps you reduce late payments.

For healthy business relationships, prompt payment is essential. A connected approach when automating accounts payable can cut down processing times and the inevitable admin that comes with manual processes. That means you can pay employee expenses and supplier invoices promptly to prevent unhappy people and penalties.

5. Connected spend makes it easier to be compliant.

A connected approach can keep you compliant across multiple areas. It can help you weed out invoice costs that are being passed off as expenses, ensure you're reclaiming VAT by expense type correctly, and give you the confidence that your spend data and reporting are robust enough to stand up to auditing.

6. Connected spend retains employees.

Employees don't want to grapple with three different but equally clunky systems for expense, travel, and invoice management. If they're frustrated, they may consider leaving. As a result, your business will lose good (and expensively trained) people who are not easy to replace - don't let things get to that stage.

7. Connected spend means more strategy and less admin.

Streamlining processes frees you up to focus on the more important aspects of your role. Your business relies on you to provide strategic insight, which cannot be achieved without a foundation of comprehensive, connected, and reliable data.

8. Connected spend helps you manage duty of care.

Capturing and consolidating travel and expense data in near real-time can help you locate employees in the event of an emergency. Combined with intelligent communication services, you can ensure all your employees are safe and accounted for.

Is your expense and travel solution disconnected? Answer a few questions to find out. Know more about SAP Concur.