Visibility and control.
Professionals report high levels of wasted spend, even when they have robust pre-approval spend processes in place.
At Airbase, we know that the insufficient approval workflows associated with employee spending of company dollars can make it difficult to control budgets. We were interested in understanding how much
visibility and control finance leaders feel they have over spending and if, with better controls, they could save on wasted spend.
Kelly Battles
Former CFO, Quora
The world is getting more and more complex, and CFOs are going to have to stay on top of it: making sure that you automate, that you have a single source of truth for your data, that you have good infrastructure around data and analytics, and that you can handle this complexity while continuing to bring the real information, not just the data, to the table. — Kelly Battles, former CFO, Quora
Of the respondents from companies with annual revenue over $500 million, more than a third (39%) estimated a 10+% savings could be achieved with better visibility and control.
At the same time, 41% of respondents reported that they feel they
do have visibility into and
control of spend before it happens through strong pre-approval processes.
Because subscription spend can be prone to waste, we asked respondents to judge their ability to efficiently manage it. More than one in five respondents (22%) said they have little visibility into company subscriptions and have little control over wasted spend that might derive from them.
It is perhaps not surprising that respondents from companies with less than $1 million in annual revenue were about half as likely to report concern with visibility into spending, as small companies have an easier time informally knowing who is spending on what.
Looking forward.
The future is automated, sure, but it’s also integrated.
We believe our data reveal that the sustained period of replacing manual tasks with technology will continue as better designed, more integrated solutions, are made available to meet the real needs of accounting and finance teams in small and midsize businesses. Our respondents rank “improving or changing operations by adding new systems or processes” as their highest priority for 2021, followed by “automating accounting tasks” and “getting control over budgets.”
Mark Hawkins
Former President and CFO, Salesforce
Those that are always forward-leaning tend to prosper, at least in my assessment of patterns.
The large enterprise software solutions that provide comprehensive finance operational and accounting support have generally been too expensive and over-engineered for the smaller companies in our sample. Now, however, there is increasing availability of tools that integrate with GL systems and specifically address laborious back-office tasks: expense reimbursements, vendor payments, corporate card solutions for small and midsize businesses. Given our data, we expect professionals to trend away from siloed tools and toward more integrated solutions, such as Airbase’s spend management platform, to make themselves more available for higher-value analytical work.
As you carry out your own plans to add new systems and processes in 2021, we invite you to
schedule a demo with one of Airbase’s spend management specialists. They can show you how Airbase provides fully integrated automation, from the very first action on spend all the way through to the GL. We’ll also show you how all actions for non-payroll spend are captured to create a full audit trail of all internal and external documentation.
