Best Spend management software: When discussing business finance management, the first people who come to mind are finance teams and accountants. It is, however, a function in which all employees play an important and active role.
Consider this: if employees fail to submit compliant expense reports on time, Finance will be unable to process reimbursements on time. This leads to disgruntled employees and delayed financial reporting.
Assume you manually manage payments and miss a payment from a spreadsheet to a software subscription that is critical for marketing and sales. A simple blunder like this can halt their entire process until the subscription is reactivated. That’s nothing short of a disaster that could cost the company money.
Business finance management can be difficult and painful for the finance team and the entire company due to its many variables and dependencies. There is, however, a simple solution—spend management software. See 18 Best Jarvis.ai Alternatives For AI Copywriting In 2022.
What exactly is spend management?
Spend management is the process by which businesses track, control, analyse, and optimise their overall spending in order to protect their financial bottom line. This includes procurement costs, management of supplier/vendor relationships, tool and software subscriptions, business travel and entertainment expenses, and so on. This does not include costs such as payroll and employee expense reimbursements.
What is the significance of spend management?
According to a McKinsey report, external spending accounts for 40–80% of a company’s total cost. We don’t need to paint a picture of how disastrous ineffective spend management can be for your company; the statistics speak for themselves.
Companies that do not have real-time visibility and control over their spending may leave themselves open to financial leaks and revenue loss in the long run. As a result, businesses that recognise and want to mitigate this risk now rely on spend management software to do the heavy lifting. The software not only assists finance teams in identifying cost-cutting opportunities, but also prevents unnecessary overspending.
The Advantages of Spend Management Software
Spend management is critical not only for large enterprises but also for SMBs seeking scalability, sustainability, and profitability. Regardless of business size, the following are some common benefits of spend management automation:
- Budget management that is effective
- Getting rid of illegal and fraudulent spending
- Control over corporate spending in real time.
- Detailed spending analysis
- Simple payables tracking and processing
What else? Finance teams can see all expenses on a single spend management dashboard, allowing them to stay on top of where money is flowing. This enables them to make better data-driven decisions that will help your business grow!
Is Spend Management Automation the best option for your company?
Spend management is the art of controlling, managing, and analysing all external spending to ensure your company gets the most bang for its buck. Furthermore, spend management software is powered by a powerful business rules engine that enables employees to spend from project or department budgets without requiring prior approval. In other words, spend management lets businesses be more agile and flexible while also making sure they always follow the rules and giving managers and employees better control.
Also, it might help to go over some common problems with manual spend management processes to figure out if you need to automate spend management.
Common issues that businesses face with manual spending management
Spend management is critical to your organization’s financial health. It covers everything from spend categorization to financial data management, spend analysis, and spend performance management. Unfortunately, traditional spend management processes are simply not up to the task, especially in the age of remote work, and can cost your company time, money, and resources.
Here are some challenges that, if not addressed properly and on time, could harm your business:
- Planning based on outdated spending data: With traditional methods of managing spend, spending data is always at least a month old. This makes it difficult for finance teams to identify and correct any unnecessary spending before it causes significant damage.
- Manual mapping of spending to budgets: Finance teams must manually match spending to budgets long after the spending has occurred. This wastes a lot of productive time and makes it more likely that mistakes will be made when entering data.
- Inadequate real-time visibility into spend: Finance teams lack real-time visibility into spend, resulting in overspending and budget noncompliance. These expenses can quickly add up, causing problems not only with overspending but also with tax authorities.
- Missed cost-cutting opportunities: When companies see overspending in the previous month or financial year, they often go on budget-cutting binges. However, rather than optimising spending, this may harm your overall business process efficiency. Real-time spend data is critical for determining where to save money and optimise operations.
- Multiple financial software systems that are incompatible with one another: If your finance team has to manually move data between software and maps, the possibility of data entry errors increases dramatically! This could also cause financial reporting delays.
- The spending process for remote employees is not optimised. If remote employees must pay for other business expenses, they must do so quickly and in accordance with compliance requirements. Traditional spend management systems, with their shared corporate cards and lengthy approval processes, are simply incapable of keeping up!
Best Spend management software
Here are some of the best spend management software to try in 2022.
#1. Moss
The following are the primary value propositions of spend management software:
- Automate processes that consume an excessive amount of your time.
- Gain visibility into your spending across various categories.
That is precisely what Moss provides its users. Yes, Moss, like any other spend management solution on this list, provides a wide range of features, services, and capabilities.
But at the end of the day, all of these features, services, and capabilities come down to automating processes and providing visibility into spending through comprehensive dashboards.
These value propositions are critical to the day-to-day operations and long-term success of any business investment. While Moss is useful for managing SaaS spend, it cannot help you optimise and/or reduce your spending.
#2. Cledara
Cledara is used by businesses as an all-in-one spend management software to completely automate SaaS-related processes. When you use Cledara as spend management software, you can scale operations, comply with regulations, save money, and do a lot more.
Too many businesses today spend a lot of money on SaaS without having a clear picture of what they’re spending. Spend management software, Cledara, assists in resolving this issue by allowing SaaS purchases via virtual corporate cards. With this spend management solution, all of your SaaS-spend data is kept in one place, allowing for better SaaS spending analysis.
When different departments use different tools for the same purpose, SaaS usage can spiral out of control. Spend management software like Cledara helps you create visibility across departments by letting everyone on your team see what SaaS products are available.
#3. Pleo
Pleo is a software programme that helps businesses keep track of and manage their spending. It uses a four-step process to help your business keep track of and manage expenses in real time:
- Pleo allows you to issue cards with spending limits to team members who require them.
- Capture Data: Your team members can quickly automate their expenses by taking pictures of their receipts as soon as they get them.
- Create Visibility: Because receipts are captured in real time, Pleo provides a complete view of your company’s expense tracking—all in one place.
- Accounting Integration: Pleo works directly with many popular business accounting tools, which makes keeping the books for your team much easier.
#4. Spendesk
Small and large organisations can take control of their spending with Spendesk spend management software, which has a feature set similar to Pleo’s. Spendesk allows you to create and manage company spending cards, automate receipt collection and invoicing, create spending reports, track budgets, and more. Users benefit from the following features when using this spend management solution:
- Accounting closes more quickly at the end of the month.
- Total transparency into overall costs.
- 95% of receipts are reconciled within 48 hours.
- You have access to an unlimited number of virtual cards and users.
#5. Payhawk
Payhawk bills its spend management software as an “all-in-one finance stack,” with features such as:
- Keeping track of expenses
- Business cards
- Invoice management
- Reimbursements
- Payment of bills
- Integrations
- More
The features listed above are crucial spend management tasks. Payhawk spend management software allows you to monitor, analyse, and manage spend while also identifying areas for savings. But Payhawk works best with the tools and services that Sastrify offers for top-level spend management.
#6. Pliant
Software for managing spending plants is a new generation of corporate cards that perfectly adapt to the spending processes and demands of businesses. How does it distinguish itself from the competition? Pliant is a simple and beautiful modular system that lets you manage digital cards and process payments.
In addition to high limits, premium card benefits, and appealing cashback, the spend management software provides seamless accounting software integration. You get a flexible and clear picture of how you spend money on SaaS, which lets you save money on card transactions.
What should you look for in a spend management system to maximise your financial efficiency?
Any successful business will extol the virtues of real-time data visibility. Businesses can gain complete control over how and where their money is spent by using the right spend management software. Furthermore, they can see the spending as it happens rather than forecasting spending at the start of the month and hoping they haven’t gone over budget by the end.
With the right spend management software, you can use real-time analytics to change and improve spending as it happens.
Here are some essential features to look for in spend management software:
Administrators’ adaptability
Choose a tool that enables administrators to automate your existing or preferred financial management processes. Tools with rigid or limited functionality may make processes more difficult for both teams and accountants. It may also pave the way for a lot of manual labour, which defeats the purpose of automation. Before looking for spend management software, you should know what your company needs and what your key stakeholders care about.
Finance teams benefit from superior customizability and control.
There isn’t much real-time data can do for your company unless your finance team has complete control over spending at all times. Superior customizability and workflow control enable administrators to truly streamline and automate processes for seamless business finance management. Furthermore, this freedom allows administrators to change or optimise workflows as the business or process grows.
Spend time on real-time and in-depth analytics.
Your spend management software should also transform all of the data it collects into actionable insights and analytics for your finance team. This is an essential feature, particularly if your goal for automation is to reduce costs and optimise spending. However, in the absence of detailed analytics, your finance team will be forced to sift through mountains of data in order to make sense of it, making it difficult for them to take timely and appropriate action to drive meaningful change.
All users will find it simple to use.
No matter how advanced the software is, it is useless if no one uses it. As a result, when shopping for essential business software such as spend management, usability should be a top priority. For example, if your chosen spend management software is clunky and difficult to use, users will not use features that are genuinely useful. Instead, they could simply delegate the task to their accounting colleagues. And the result is a time-consuming, error-prone manual spending reporting process.
Choose software that requires no training and provides an absurdly simple way for employees to contribute. This makes the entire process run more smoothly, quickly, and in real time.
Final thoughts
No matter what tool you choose for managing your spending, it should be able to automate the way you already do things.
Take, for example, corporate cards. Spend management software providers are notorious for pushing their own cards on clients, forcing them to abandon their existing or preferred corporate card vendors and change their process from the top down in order to improve the spend management experience. The simpler experience is worthwhile. Forcing businesses to change their processes in order to accommodate the capabilities of spend management software is not an ideal solution. It delays implementation periods and faces employee resistance when asked to switch to an entirely new way of doing things.
To address this issue, Fyle is developing spend management software based on a Bring Your Own Cards model. Fyle will basically allow direct feeds from your existing or preferred corporate card vendors and make all spend data available to administrators on a unified spend management dashboard.
Fyle also helps businesses make smooth, fully automated spend management systems with features like easy business expense tracking, card spend tracking, automatic corporate card reconciliations, and tight integrations with all major accounting software. 3