The battle to secure long term financial stability for your business rages each day. In light of present uncertain economic uncertainty, finding ways to save money and track your business spending is key to your continued success. Improper allocation of funds, overspending and hidden costs are all problems that need to be addressed to help your business achieve continued success.
Spend visibility is a vital business tool that helps you not only see where the money is going, but allows you to acquire a larger picture of how the money your business spends moves through the company. A competent spend visibility service can help you track where your funds are going while providing additional benefits in addition to helping you develop a plan to ensure the longevity of your business by understanding how the money is being used at every step of the purchase process.
Today, we’re going to cover a few ways the metrics provided by a good spend visibility service can help you save significant amounts of money and improve your business spending in real-time.
Discover why money is being spent
One of the primary reasons a vendor is chosen for a particular job at a business is related to cost. Knowing when and where money is being spent helps your company assess when suppliers are eager for business and drop their prices. Unfortunately, managing large amounts of spend data on your own is near impossible, so assessing your spending with services and software can help make sense of whether your spending is effective or not. It’s equally important to know why money is being spent.
Spend analysis lets you discover the reasons for a job being done and determine if the spending was necessary for the continued operation of your business or if it is something that could have been handled differently or at a later time. Knowing why money is spent can also help eliminate unnecessary or superfluous expenses related to procurement.
Discovering and understanding why money is being spent on certain jobs, vendors or suppliers helps inform your budget and makes a big difference in assessing your spending and associated risks. Using a service or software that keeps track of this data provides an effective tool for knowing every detail related to your organization’s spend visibility.
Get spending metrics in real time
The key to success is knowing what you’re spending and analytics are your secret weapon in the battle for assessing your spend visibility. An analysis service helps you save more by showing you historical and current metrics related to your spending. Benefits of these metrics help you clearly define spend categories and successfully analyze your data so you can consistently create an action plan for keeping your spending on track and avoid maverick spending (spending outside of the preferred supplier list or procurement process).
Improved data quality and real time metrics provide instant insight into your spend and sets up an easier procurement process. The analytics can be used across the organization to determine pain points, issues with maverick spend or fraud, inform procurement decisions and ultimately lead to potential savings across the board.
Analyze and detect fraud
Using spend visibility software gives you
Minimizing maverick spend and fraud are high priorities when assessing your spend. Having real time data available helps you detect misappropriation of assets or financial statement fraud across your entire company, helping you spot and eliminate fraud as much as possible within your organization.
Create savings throughout the spending process
Once you have all the analytics available at a glance and begin assessing them, you’ll be able to see where your company struggles with inappropriate spending, supplier interaction or poor procurement practices. Then, a savvy business owner can start figuring out where money is being mishandled and create a plan to stop risky spending and decrease problem spending across the company.
By having all data from past spend available, it becomes easier to find a vendor who charges less, but does superior work than a previous vendor. Real time metrics and quality data can also help you create a list of trusted vendors within the preferred system that will make each dollar you spend on them worthwhile, saving you money in the process.
Conclusion
Understanding spend visibility and its relationship to your own business is just the first step in finding a solution to spending stability. An excellent service like the one provided by Coupa can make the complex challenges of analyzing spend visibility simple.
Specializing in innovation and intuitive business solutions, Coupa’s spend visibility servive provides an easy user interface with the ability to create custom reports of your spend analysis, risk and visibility. Take control of your company’s spend visibility in the present to foster success in the future.
