Spend Compliance Challenges for Utility and Energy Companies

Key points

• Utility and energy companies must comply with municipal, state, and federal regulations, including those of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
• Many such organizations maintain multiple outdated, on-premises legacy financial systems to store and audit employee spend data.
• Legacy systems make it hard to see how money is spent and by whom, review and control spend before it happens, and enforce spend policy compliance.
• Organizations struggle to spot data patterns hidden across channels or systems and to actively identify and mitigate spend fraud, waste, and abuse.
• The post recommends modernizing and automating to insert controls at the point of purchase, improve expense report accuracy, and use AI and machine learning to automatically review expense and receipt data.