If you’re looking to significantly improve how your business manages corporate spend, it’s important to increase the efficiency of your payment workflows.
To achieve this, there’s one thing you need to implement in your process:
A spend management platform.
In this article, you’ll learn what a spend management platform is and why it’s the perfect tool to help you optimize your payment workflows.
What is a spend management platform?
A spend management platform is advanced software that gives you full control over your corporate spend.
The software gives you complete visibility over your business spend, where you can see every transaction that takes place across every area of the company. This can be payments made by certain employees, various teams, specific cards, or any other type of transaction.
On top of this, you’ll also be able to use a wide range of features which are designed to give you further control over your spending. You can accurately monitor and refine every aspect of your corporate spend, so your process runs smoothly and efficiently for your finance team.
How can spend management optimize your payment workflows?
One of the most important aspects of improving your corporate spend is optimizing your payment workflows. With the right spend management platform, you can achieve this in a wide variety of ways, including:
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Various spend controls
Spend management software gives you access to a range of spend controls, and these are important for helping you optimize your workflows.
For example, one of the controls available is the use of spend limits.
These are specific limits you can set on your payments so that any transactions which might exceed a certain amount are prevented.
As well as this, you have full flexibility when it comes to implementing your spend limits. You can decide to set different limits for each team in the company, for each corporate credit card, or even for specific types of purchases.
This way, only payments that align with your company budgets will be permitted, and you won’t need to spend time analyzing each payment to see if it’s suitable.
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Automated payment processes
Another way you can optimize your payment workflows is with automated payment processes.
These allow you to complete a variety of processes within your spend management, without needing any manual intervention.
For instance, one thing this includes is being able to automate your approval processes. This allows every payment request that fits within certain criteria to be automatically approved.
With traditional forms of payment approvals, it can often take several days before a transaction is reviewed and either accepted or rejected.
However, automated approvals allow transactions to complete much quicker, without any delays or interruptions from long-winded approval processes.
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Useful spend insights
You can also optimize your payment workflows with the useful spend insights that are offered by your spend management platform.
These insights help you understand exactly how your business is spending money, and where you can be more efficient.
For example, you can receive insights into which areas of your company are spending the most over a certain period. This can be specific teams, or certain types of payments — e.g., employee expenses or software purchases.
This way, you’ll know exactly where to focus your efforts on improving workflows, such as implementing spend limits or new conditions for your approval processes.
The more visibility you have into your corporate spend, the more effectively you can adjust your workflows.
