How a Business Spend Management System enhances the CFO’s role

Technology is changing the role of the CFO. And with business resilience, financial risk management and cost control now more important than ever, CFOs can’t afford to ignore digital transformation if they want to stay relevant and pull away from the competition.

While traditional functions such as accounting, tax, compliance and financial management are still required, the CFOs’ scope has widened to include strategic IT, key performance indicators, digital analysis and risk management. Forward-looking CFOs are using predictive data and insight to support their decision making.

But how can the CFO embrace digital technology? A Business Spend Management system is certainly one of the answers to achieving more.

Why use a Business Spend Management (BSM) system?

BSMs are digital platforms that support the source-to-pay lifecycle and offer enormous benefits to any organisation who recognises the need to adapt and evolve. They are focused on gathering all the information required to analyse and support decision making for your business spend function.

With a BSM, routine finance and accounting tasks are automated, dramatically reducing paper-based and manual activities and freeing up the finance function to focus on more strategic or sophisticated work. A BSM drives operational efficiency into your organisation and delivers savings, helping to fine tune processes and giving you the visibility and oversight of your business expenditure so you can make the right decisions.

Other significant benefits include:

• Procurement: becomes a more agile because processes are streamlined, pre-configured and automated, reducing approvals and improving control. Bringing spend under procurement and finance management also generates significant savings, often 5%+ of external spend.
• AP department: increases efficiency because automated processes reduce unnecessary time and effort spent on manual administration or in tracking down information that relates to specific invoices. Moving to touchless processing delivers savings but also allows the team to focus on other aspects such as working capital management, financing, and discounting.
• Supplier management: lets you get more value out of your suppliers, from establishing preferred supplier contracts, to improved delivery times, payment terms and quality. It will also be easier to optimise early payment discounts if you have a single lens on what is being spent in your organisation.
• Operational expenditure: oversight of past, existing and future financial commitment down to line item level gives you a complete financial picture for you to manage budgets and plan.
  Reporting: this is made much easier with statistical analysis and AI-powered insight into benchmark performance data. You’ll get full visibility into all your business spend data enabling you to make KPI comparisons and track progress.

Find out more

Download our latest ebook, created in collaboration with our partner Coupa, which focuses on the 5 key procurement considerations for a CFO. Find out in more detail how an effective Business Spend Management system can help support your business, create further operational efficiencies and help you spend smarter: Solving your Source to Pay challenges: 5 considerations for the CFO.