How do you sum up true financial efficiency in one word? Data. Many organizations don’t collect enough of it, and the ones that do often suffer from blind spots that prevent them from uncovering opportunities to optimize their spending. It’s a problem that snowballs as your organization scales — meaning the longer it takes for you to get a handle on it, the more visibility you’ll lose.
Check to make sure “Good Enough” really is
You may think your analytics are good enough because you have access to some data and you’ve evolved beyond using Excel. Yes, many analytics tools can break down changes in spending by division, department, employee, or acquired company. Many of those tools miss the deeper insights that can lead to true financial efficiency and all the variables that start to pile up as the organization scales.
This is when “good enough” starts to break down. Often, these tools aren’t centralized. Instead, finance teams pull analytics from various sources, like ERPs and CRMs. This type of siloed environment cannot effectively connect the dots when a growing organization has challenges like:
- Different accounts payable policies by department or job function
- Different travel and expenses policies by department or job function
- Ever-growing data fields about human capital (such as the employee, their team, and their boss) and the expenses themselves (the cost, location, and card used)
As a result, deciphering the reason behind an increase or decrease in spending takes a lot of legwork. After all, each analytics source has its own data standards — many of them incredibly granular — so finance must first standardize and refine everything before they can begin to dig for insights. Not only does this require more time and energy, but there’s also a chance the data will still be too complicated for teams to make informed decisions about policy or personnel to improve the organization’s financial health.
What’s the answer?
Now that we’ve discussed all the challenges, let’s discuss the solution. It’s simpler than you think; best of all, it can be summed up in another word: Integration. Integrating analytics tools with your existing accounting and T&E systems removes siloes and automatically captures and consolidates everything your team needs to make faster, smarter decisions.
The time typically spent capturing, attributing, and processing spending data can now be used to tackle other projects. Imagine how much happier your team will be getting out of the weeds, eliminating menial tasks, and focusing on higher-value activities so they can feel like a mission-critical part of the organization.
That employee happiness is even more crucial than you think
In our recent research report, Finance Trends: How Finance Leaders Can Thrive during a Recession in 2023, we discovered that one of the biggest reasons finance leaders are turning to automate more processes is to eliminate burnout and increase satisfaction and retention. We also found that top talent wants to spend time on higher-value projects and tasks. After basics like hours, compensation, and benefits, a “step up in responsibility” was ranked the most valued attribute in a new job.
The bottom line for your bottom line
Finance teams that rely on outdated spend management systems face a number of operational inefficiencies that significantly impact their bottom line. Automation is an effective way to start saving time, but optimizing analytics and applying them to reporting is where finance teams and organizations see the real business impact of data.
These insights are just the beginning. Take a deeper dive into how advanced spend management analytics capabilities through AI and ML can give you a crucial advantage and the incredible boost in financial wellness that happens when the most comprehensive insights are available at the click of a mouse in our new ebook Better Financial Efficiency Starts With Data and Analytics.