SAP Concur released a new eBook examining the risks that come as businesses grow or shift, including invoice proliferation, decentralized spending decisions as budgets expand, new tax and regulatory requirements when entering new markets, inconsistent processes across locations, and harder spend analysis. The eBook proposes intelligent automation to improve spend visibility, efficiency, and consistency.
SAP Concur blog identifies three internal barriers to business growth: paper-based expense and invoice processes, lack of policy compliance, and unapproved spend. It cites research that automation speeds up expense approval by up to 80%, and gives examples: London charity Thames Reach moved to SAP Concur and reduced filing from a six-foot-high cabinet to a concertina file in the first six months; customer RED found £27,000 spent with Amazon last year was all unapproved and has now moved to a single Amazon Business account.
SAP Concur published an article identifying five spend management issues businesses often overlook during expansion: insufficient preapprovals making future spending hard to forecast; limited audit resources while errors and fraud typically consume 5% of annual revenue; insufficient process automation; big data that is hard to turn into usable insights; and unclaimed VAT refunds in cross-border operations. The article suggests expanding SAP Concur solutions to address these challenges.
The SAP Concur blog highlights a study by Oxford Economics and SAP Concur that surveyed 500 finance and IT executives worldwide, 350 of whom came from companies with 1,000 or more employees. The study found that large global enterprises often struggle harder than smaller companies with expansion challenges, as scale and complexity make more data, invoices, and administration difficult to handle. It identifies visibility into spending and attention to cash flow as pillars of successful growth, and argues that investing early in digital finance transformation to automate spend management makes sense.