How has teleworking democratised the decentralisation of corporate purchasing management?
The health and economic crisis has forced companies to question their organisational model.
The spread of teleworking in service companies has highlighted the need for effective processes and tools to enable employees to remain productive and have access to all the information they need, despite the distance. The habits and routines of the financial and operational teams were reviewed in order to avoid friction and frustration.
In such a context, how best to manage business expenses? How do you give autonomy to operational teams while retaining control over their purchases? How do you keep track of who spends what and recover all the payment receipts?
I'm going to share with you some of the trends I've observed in my discussions with finance teams, company founders and our customers.
Digitalisation and automation of the purchasing process
In these highly uncertain times, cash management is crucial ("cash is king"). In fact, according to a PWC study, it will be the number 2 priority for CFOs in 2021, second only to performance management.
The key to controlling cash flow is to have a clear picture of what is coming in and what is going out. Even though business activity has generally slowed considerably, companies have continued to make purchases.And it wasn't always easy for them to have real-time visibility of what they were spending. Marketing teams continued to advertise online, developers continued to use their software tools and, in general, all employees needed to equip themselves to work effectively from home.
So we had to adapt and rethink the remote purchasing management process to avoid delays or potential security breaches. This is exactly where the digitisation of tools and processes comes in!
For online purchases, it was unthinkable to transmit the company's bank card details by telephone, or even worse, by e-mail. But that didn't mean we could block all employee spending. Some companies therefore decided to implement Spendesk at this point to streamline and digitise the validation and payment process: the operational teams enter their needs into Spendesk and submit a purchase request, the finance department or department manager validates it, the employee then has access to a secure, single-use payment method, and the finance department views the payments in real time.
| Spendesk gives SMEs control and visibility over all their company purchases. Whether you're in the office or working from home, we make it easy to manage business expenses: you validate, pay, reconcile and account for them all in one place. |
In practical terms, when you 'dematerialise' (or digitise) your purchasing management process, you move from a physical format (e.g. paper expense claims, a physical card passed from hand to hand, receipts archived in filing cabinets, etc.) or a hybrid format (e-mail combined with a physical card and Excel) to a totally digital format (dematerialised expense claims, virtual cards and digital archiving of receipts archived in filing cabinets, etc.).) or hybrid format (e-mail combined with a physical card and Excel) to a totally digital format (dematerialised expense report, virtual cards and digital archiving of receipts).
Automating the purchasing process is the next step. This involves creating intelligent rules between the different stages of the process, or automating manual input to eliminate time-consuming actions with little added value (such as entering accounting entries or manually validating expenses by e-mail).
But beware: automation cannot be achieved without digitisation first!
If we look more specifically at the management of business purchases, it is possible to dematerialise expense claims, digitise the validation and monitoring of supplier invoices, digitally archive payment receipts, and even generate virtual payment cards.
None of this is really new. What is new is the ability to automate the entire purchasing process by integrating all stages of the process (from validation to accounting), for all types of expenditure, in a single solution.
In practical terms, digitising and automating the entire purchasing process means :
- Creating spending policies and validation rules that are directly connected to payment methods and your management interface, so you have control without manual work;
- Automating the collection of payment receipts and accounting reconciliation;
- Enrich payment data in real time (analytical data, supplier data, team data, etc.);
- Gather all supplier invoices to be paid and automate monitoring of the payment schedule;
- Automate accounting entries using pre-defined rules, etc.
This means you no longer have to worry about a large number of tasks. No more chasing after receipts when you close your accounts, or waiting for your staff to submit their expense claims at the end of the month. You save time and reduce the risk of errors inherent in manual processing.
Dematerialisation and automation enable companies to make real savings. Quite simply because the time allocated to time-consuming tasks is reduced for all teams. The ROI (Return On Investment) is the result of the time saved and the savings made (VAT not recovered in the past, sub-optimal expense management, internal or external fraud, etc.).
As well as saving time, automation takes a major mental burden off your shoulders.
Digitalisation and automation of accounting
Today's businesses can also automate many accounting tasks using increasingly intuitive software. Managing expense claims, processing supplier invoices, reconciling and monitoring bank accounts... all time-consuming but necessary tasks. Accountants and finance managers, who are often overworked, can now spend more time on strategic decisions than on data entry.
In the interests of efficiency, it is essential to put in place the right tools to manage each stage of the accounting management process for professional purchases.
In concrete terms:
- Controlling purchases, with a clear spending policy, budgets defined upstream, and an intelligent way of validating requests and protecting against fraud.
- Pay, with access to secure payment methods, easy collection of supplier invoices, and the ability to reimburse expense claims in just a few clicks.
- Accounting, with easy collection of receipts, reconciliation of payments, tracking of transaction history and allocation of your accounting codes.
By digitising and automating these steps, you save time (automatic generation of entries, use of data present in invoices, preparation of VAT returns) and data reliability with minimal risk of human error.
Digitalisation and automation of financial reporting
The automatic integration of expenses into the accounting software, the categorisation of payments and the centralisation of all financial data facilitate the construction of structured and rigorous audits.
In particular, this data helps to improve the company's performance, to monitor changes in performance in real time, to anticipate changes in its sales cycle and growth, and adapt its purchasing strategies to the new realities of the market.
Business intelligence reporting has never been easier, enabling CFOs to build a vision for the future of their company and become a strategic partner.
The CFO and his or her team are now seen as the company's true business partners.A good partner needs to have maximum visibility of the company's health in order to make the right decisions and advise those he is dealing with.
To do this, they need two things:
- Make sure that the data they are working with is accurate.
- Have enough time to devote to analysing this data.
And, once again, that's where automation comes in!
By automating your financial reporting, you can hand over all your time-consuming and unrewarding tasks to a dedicated, more reliable software package, and save time in the process. This report will centralise, process and format all your company's key data. You can also distribute it more easily to all your employees.
In conclusion, I would say that teleworking encourages our organisations to be based on good processes and tools that enable each employee to be autonomous in their work. Bringing a decentralised organisation to life with serenity is a major asset in terms of performance and attractiveness.
That's what we believe in at Spendesk, and that's how we support our customers, every day.
If you would like to find out more about our solution, please contact our team. We'll be delighted to answer all your questions!
Article translated from French