Strong analytics and visibility are driving pretty much everything Canadian businesses do. Gone are the days of trying things and hoping for the best. Businesses have the software and technology at their disposal to get deep insights into every aspect of operations.
Analytics can drive better decision making and allow organizations to meet a variety of strategic, value-driven objectives more effectively. CFOs can use expense management analytics as a way to evaluate current operations, spot trends, and see where improvements can be made.
One area where you can use analytics is expense management, and the following are some specific things to know.
Identifying Fraud
Fraud isn’t something a lot of CFOs necessarily want to think about in their organization, but it’s essential. For so long the idea of expense fraud is one that’s been ingrained in the way people do business. It got to the point where a lot of employees probably didn’t even see it as wrong. Instead, they just viewed it as something everyone was doing.
Fraud has significant ramifications for businesses, however.
It is not only costly, but it also shifts the corporate culture of a business and makes it one where other ethical issues may be more likely to arise. It’s imperative to be able to spot fraud in order to eliminate it, and this is one of the things that can be achieved with advanced expense management software.
Spending Versus Budgets
When a company’s not using a modern expense management platform, they may book travel for employees that aren’t in line with current budget restrictions.
One of the many advantages of analytics stemming from an expense management system is the fact that you can have real-time visibility. This means that you can compare upcoming travel plans with budgets and make sure that travel or plans aren’t going to lead to excessive spending.
Discount Opportunities
There are plenty of discounts to be found within the area of expense management. For example, hotel and airline companies are prone to offering volume discounts to certain companies, but you need to ask for them in many cases.
These discounts can be pretty significant, but you’ll need to be able to prove that you really are bringing volume spending.
Look no further than the analytic features of your expense management software. This will allow you to sift through a multitude of data points and quickly and easily find the ones most relevant to your current negotiations.
Policy Changes
Finally, sometimes leaders may find by looking at expense management analytics that their employees aren’t necessarily fraudulent in their actions, but that doesn’t mean that changes don’t need to be made. Even large international companies tend to have pretty outdated T&E policies in many cases, and it’s not an area they necessarily revisit often to ensure it still meets their needs and is bringing the best ROI. Expense analytics can provide a window into where policy changes might be necessary to ensure expense ROI is where it needs to be, and it can drive specific policy change based on facts, rather than feelings or theories.
