Applying intelligent spend management to attain desired business outcomes

It’s rightly said, “You can’t cut your way to growth, but you can cut your way to survival.”

With the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting the entire business landscape and transforming how people spend their money, organizations must apply intelligent expense management to sustain within limited resources and attain their desired goals.

Employee spend, formerly company-controlled, has shifted to employee control, wreaking havoc on travel and other expense management. Peter Drucker was often quoted as saying, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” meaning organizations must effectively track their employee spending to achieve the right outcomes for their business.

In relation to employee spend, such as travel, meal, airfare, mileage, and other discretionary low-level spend, these outcomes translate into increasing expense visibility and keeping the spend controlled while simultaneously complying with the organization’s expense policies and enabling employees’ handling of payments, reporting, and invoice processing.

Understanding intelligent spend management

While most companies have regulations, policies, and budgets to adhere to when it comes to employee spend, they still discover a significant amount of expense that remains unaccounted for until after it has been incurred. 

Employees often use cash or a personal card, instead of using a corporate card or a p-card, to make hotel and airfare reservations. Such expenses escape the expense team’s purview until they are submitted for reimbursement, which can happen months after they were incurred.

An intelligent spend management system must not only manage every source of spend (air travel, mileage, lodging, etc.) but also every expense category (including supplies, sales, home office, and others), and provide a single-window view of all expenses that benefits all the departments within the organization.

Additionally, real-time data and analytics ensure employee spend aligns with the organizational goals. Moreover, better visibility and insight into everyday employee expenditure facilitates compliance with stipulated budgets, reduces the risk of fraud, and allows organizations to secure better deals and payment terms with vendors. 

Best practices for intelligent spend management   

The path to intelligent spend management comprises of a few best practices, which are as follows – 

• Capture more spend through corporate cards, online booking tools, pictures of receipts, etc., by making spend recording easier for employees.
• Design workflows for spend routing and approval.
• Proactive classification of spend data by expense category, vendor, spending levels, etc.
• Use of BI dashboards and powerful reporting tools to analyze spend metrics and expedite decision-making.
• Increase the frequency of spending analyses and mitigate fraud through automated rules and auditing.
• Encourage the use of corporate cards and p-cards for increased visibility.

How can Zaggle help with your spend management needs?

Zaggle Save, our comprehensive digital expense management solution, recognizes that spend management is the need of the hour and provides a centralized view of expenses at all times on any device.

Your employees spend using the Zaggle card and can capture receipts on the mobile app. Through real-time dashboards and reports, the company has 100% visibility and control over organization-wide employee expenditure.

Our software caters to businesses of all sizes and allows organizations to create as many users as they need for employees. Approvers can view all expenses and their corresponding receipts, filter and see reports as per their requirement, and approve or reject the spend with a click.

Some of the intelligent features of our expense management offering include the following – 

1. Optical character recognition (OCR) converts printed text on receipts and stores it as data, thus eliminating the manual effort involved in entering expense information.
2. Zaggle’s centralized email keeps a store of all your receipts, including airline, lodging, meal expenses, etc.
3. The system can create expenses in any currency using automatic currency conversion or allow you to enter the exchange rate manually.
4. Employees can raise travel requests, including preferred airline seating, accommodation choices, cab rentals, etc., through multi-level travel approval workflows and ensure every expense is accounted for by the company.
5. Geolocation, GPS-enabled, and odometer-defined mileage trackers, with an option to account for differential rates, for automated and transparent mileage tracking.
6. Facilitates automatic calculation of per diem allowance based on the employee’s level and designation.
7. Create custom approval workflows and set up approval preferences as per your requirement.
8. Define your expense policies and approval settings to ensure compliance with company policies.
9. Set up input fields for expense reports, as required.

Our solution promises 100% digitization of all employee spend. To know more about Zaggle Save, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.