spend management

  • By ProcureDesk
  • May 05,2023
  • 10 min read

spend management

Introduction

Spending is a crucial factor that can affect the profit of your company. Although, there are still a few organizations that find themselves struggling in this area. We believe that is something you would not like for your business.

In this resource, we will dive deep into spend management and understand what it is, why it’s important, the benefits it can bring to your company, and ways you can have a successful spend management system for your business.

Are you ready to improve the way you handle your financial statements? Let’s begin!

What Is Spend Management?

Spend management is a comprehensive approach that ensures your business effectively manages its finances. It involves tracking, controlling, and optimizing your spending to maximize efficiency and reduce costs. This process can be used to cover a variety of areas, such as:

1. Managing relationships with suppliers

2. Monitoring financial risks associated with maverick spending

3. Monitoring inventory and contract management

4. Revisiting company manual processing and opting for automation

Using spend management and procurement software of your preferred spend management platform, your company can easily gain visibility into company money and identify your potential saving opportunities.

A successful spend management strategy can benefit your finance department and your entire company as you can reduce procurement costs and improve supplier relationships through strategic sourcing. In addition, having a successful spending management strategy can allow your business to make the most of your financial resources.

Why Is Spend Management Important?

Spend management is important because it allows your business to optimize finances and reduce costs. This process can also help your business minimize human error by automating the procurement process, streamlining supplier management, and reducing the need for single-source vendors.

Additionally, implementing spend management strategies for your company also helps you avoid costly maverick spending associated with corporate cards!

Having the right spending management strategies in your business can undoubtedly extend beyond your company just by saving money. A successful strategy in place can help your business:

1. Improve your strategic sourcing capabilities

2. Foster better relationships with your suppliers

3. Gain greater confidence in the accuracy of your financial data

Moreover, spend management software or platforms can provide an easy-to-use interface that simplifies the entire procurement process for the organization.

What Are The Types Of Spending?

Spend management encompasses a wide range of activities within your company related to tracking and monitoring your company spending. This may include procurement costs, inventory management, contract management, and manual processes associated with your finance teams.

In addition, spend management also involves developing a comprehensive strategy that outlines how your money should be spent within your organization.

Here are the types of Expenses for your reference:

1. Procurement Spending: This includes the costs of acquiring goods and services from external suppliers, such as raw materials, supplies, and equipment. Procurement spending is a major area of focus for spending management, as it can significantly impact a company’s bottom line.

2. Operational Spending: This refers to the costs associated with day-to-day operations, such as rent, utilities, employee salaries, and office supplies. Businesses must monitor operational spending to identify opportunities to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

3. Capital Spending: This involves the purchase of assets that are intended to generate revenue or provide long-term benefits to the organization, such as machinery, vehicles, or real estate. Capital spending decisions can have a major impact on a company’s finances, and it is important for businesses to carefully analyze these investments to ensure they are providing a positive return.

4. Discretionary Spending: This refers to non-essential expenses, such as employee perks, travel, and entertainment costs. While discretionary spending can be important for maintaining employee morale and building customer relationships, businesses must monitor these expenses to ensure they are not overspending.

What Is An Example Of Spend Management?

One example of spend management is the procurement process. This involves managing the entire cycle of a purchase or service, from supplier selection to the final delivery and payment of the product.

It may also include tasks such as:

1. Vendor selection

2. Contract negotiation

3. Procurement strategy development

4. Price comparison

5. Supplier Evaluation

6. Performance monitoring

A successful procurement process requires your business to clearly understand the goods and services needed by your organization and how you must procure them.

For instance, companies operating in multiple countries and regions must have a robust global spend management system to ensure standardization across all locations.

Your procurement teams must also be aware of potential human error or maverick spending when approving expenses and managing corporate card usage.

What Are Steps Involved In The Spend Management Process?

Spend management is a process that helps organizations effectively manage and gain complete control over their spending on suppliers and vendors.

Here’s a breakdown of the key steps involved in the spend management process:

1. Identification, Selection, and Evaluation of Suppliers: This step involves identifying potential suppliers, evaluating their offerings, and selecting the best ones based on quality, cost, and reliability.

2. Tracking and Monitoring of Spending: Once suppliers have been selected, tracking and monitoring all associated spending is important. This includes keeping track of invoices and payments, ensuring compliance with company policies, and identifying areas where savings are possible. Thus, bringing your business better financial health.

3. Implementation of Automated Solutions: To streamline the spend management process, companies should invest in software that provides automated solutions for budgeting, invoice and payment tracking, and contract creation.

4. Improved Visibility into total spending: An effective spend management process provides improved visibility into total spending across the organization. This helps identify areas where cost savings can be made and ensures compliance with company policies. Aside from that, it also prevents unnecessary spending within your business.

5. Streamlining Manual Processes: Spend management software can help streamline manual processes prone to human error or maverick spending, improving overall efficiency.

6. Better Management of corporate card spending: A comprehensive spend management platform can help procurement departments and finance teams better manage corporate card spending while also ensuring compliance with company policies.

By leveraging an effective spending management strategy, your organization can save time and money while ensuring compliance with corporate policies.

What Are The 6 Benefits Of Spend Management For Your Company?

Without a doubt, spending management can bring numerous benefits to your organization.

Here are some of the benefits it can bring to your company:

1. Cost Reduction: By improving visibility into total spending across the entire organization, companies can identify areas for cost savings and optimize their supplier relationships, reducing procurement activities’ costs.

2. Improved Efficiency: A comprehensive spend management platform can streamline manual processes, prevent time-consuming tasks, and help procurement departments and finance teams better manage corporate card spending while ensuring compliance with company policies. This can lead to increased efficiency throughout operations.

3. Better Supplier Relationships: Effective spend management can help companies identify the best suppliers and build stronger relationships, resulting in better quality products or services.

4. Increased Compliance: By automating processes and ensuring compliance with company policies on money spent by employees, a spend management system can reduce the risk of fraud and other financial risks.

5. Enhanced Strategic Planning: Companies can better analyze their spending patterns and make more informed decisions about future procurement activities with improved visibility into total spending. This can lead to better strategic planning, competitive advantage in the marketplace, and an opportunity to analyze purchasing process.

6. Improved Cash Flow: By optimizing supplier relationships and reducing costs, companies can improve their cash flow and reinvest savings into other business areas.

What Are The Ways To Improve Spend Management Strategy?

A successful spend management strategy begins with your company having the right tools and processes.

By leveraging your inventory management system, your company can better track your company spending and identify areas where you can optimize procurement costs. Aside from that, strategic sourcing practices must also be implemented to ensure your business gets the best deals from your suppliers.

Furthermore, organizations must create a clear procurement policy that outlines expectations for money spent by employees and guidelines for maverick spending.

Your teams must also explore implementing modern spend management software solutions to provide your business with real-time data visibility into your total spending. Software solutions allow a more streamlined process and greater transparency, especially in supplier relationships.

Finally, an effective contract management system should be put in place to ensure that companies have access to all documents related to their suppliers in one easily accessible location.

By following these important pointers, your business can maximize efficiency while ensuring compliance with company expenditure policies.

Ultimately, having a comprehensive spend management system will lead to improved financial performance and greater success in the long run.

How Can Spend Management Improve The Procurement Process?

Spend management can significantly impact the procurement process in several ways. First and foremost, it provides companies with a clear and accurate understanding of their spending, which allows them to make more informed purchasing decisions. By analyzing spending trends and identifying areas of optimization, businesses can negotiate better supplier contracts, leverage economies of scale, and make strategic purchasing decisions that align with their financial goals.

In addition to providing valuable insights, spend management technology also streamlines the procurement process by automating workflows and reducing the need for manual processes. This saves time and reduces the likelihood of errors or maverick spending, which can hurt a company’s bottom line.

Moreover, spend management systems can be integrated with corporate card vendors to provide additional control over purchasing costs. This allows companies to set limits and restrictions on card usage, track expenses in real time, and generate reports to help identify areas for improvement.

Finally, implementing a comprehensive spend management strategy can help businesses reduce overall procurement costs while ensuring compliance with organizational guidelines on expenditure. This helps organizations gain savings opportunity and promotes transparency and accountability in the procurement process.

Tips For Choosing A Spend Management Software For Your Business

A spend management software can help streamline your entire procurement process by giving your company greater visibility into your spending habits while reducing errors associated with manual processes.

These systems are designed to automate the aspects of your procurement cycle, including budgeting, tracking invoices and payments, creating contracts for single-source purchases, validating transactions against existing policies, and more.

As businesses increasingly strive to optimize their financial performance, the need for effective spend management software has grown. When selecting a single platform, certain features and functions should be considered. These include the following:

1. Real-time data visibility: The software should provide real-time visibility into company spending across the organization. This will allow finance teams to monitor spending trends, identify areas of optimization, and easily manage supplier relationships.

2. Automation: The software should have automated workflows that reduce the need for manual processes, reducing errors associated with human error or maverick spending. Automated workflows can also save time and increase productivity.

3. Integration with corporate cards: The software should be able to integrate with corporate cards to streamline expenses and provide additional control over purchasing costs. This will allow companies to set limits and restrictions on card usage, track company expenses in real-time, and generate reports to help identify areas for improvement.

4. Customization: The software should be customizable to meet the organization’s specific needs. This includes configuring spending categories, setting approval workflows, and creating custom reports.

5. Compliance: The software should help ensure compliance with organizational guidelines on expenditure. This includes enforcing spending policies and providing audit trails for all transactions.

6. Analytics and reporting: The software should have robust analytics and reporting capabilities to provide insight into spending patterns and help identify areas for optimization. This includes generating reports on spending trends, supplier performance, and budget variances.

7. User-friendly interface: The software should have a user-friendly interface that is easy to navigate and use. This will help ensure adoption and compliance by employees across the organization.

Take note that spending management software that meets your company’s needs can give your company greater efficiency when controlling your finances!

Conclusion

Overall, spend management is important for your company to reduce costs and enhance supplier relationships. Using spend management software, you can provide better visibility into your company spending, automate your manual processes, and even gain more control over your finances.

If you’re looking for spend management to help you with your bottom line, ProcureDesk is here to help you. Book a demo call with us today!