Change is Constant. Here’s How Your Business Can Get Ready

Economic uncertainty and armed conflicts. A pandemic accelerates remote and hybrid work while shattering some markets and opening others. Artificial intelligence provides leaps in opportunities and efficiencies. Sales rise and fall, taking budgets with them and altering even the best-laid plans. The list goes on, with some scenarios imaginable and others beyond what businesses can envision. 

Finance leaders recognize the need to pivot, with 90% of CFOs agreeing or strongly agreeing their top task is preparing for the unexpected.¹ So the question isn’t whether the ground will shift under your business. The question is whether your business will be ready to shift with it. But whether change is seen coming or not, companies can be ready with the right tools and a strategy to increase flexibility and resilience as the next calendar year or fiscal year approaches.  

4 Ways to Future-Proof Your Business 

Read our new whitepaper for steps on mastering cash flow and compliance, strengthening visibility and analytics, adapting processes and policies, and boosting productivity and employee experience. 

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 The benefits of greater spend visibility, efficiency, control, and compliance apply not just in crises but in good times, like having the ability to scale up when new markets open, sales zoom, and the team expands in number or location. They apply to areas of your business beyond travel and expense, but T&E provides a particularly good example because it touches so much of a company’s operations. 

Using a Single Platform 

One cloud-based platform for travel, expense, and invoice safely and securely connects data, your finance team, and employees across departments and locations. The integration with ERPs and other finance systems also helps you cut down on silos of technology and decision-making. 

When you have a single streamlined and automated system, data moves back and forth easily. Company policies are embedded and communicated to employees, guiding them to preferred choices and stopping non-compliant spending before it takes place. Because policies are built-in, they can adjust as conditions change.  

The automated platform, backed up with compliance-protecting AI, brings you digital control and confidence to your two big sources of spending – travel and expense-, so you can make sure that – no matter what happens – all your spending is quality spending.  

Gaining Visibility and Insights 

Poor visibility into employee spending stymies decisions and flexibility, and about 6 in 10 decision-makers say their finance leaders lack a transparent view.² 

Advanced analytics allow you to examine all your data to ensure spending is on track or to accommodate new priorities. Strong reporting tools and standard and customizable dashboards make the data understandable, easing the complexity of budgeting and forecasting. And with intelligent solutions providing more accurate data, managing tax compliance is easier. Human expertise adds to the power by helping refine data and adjust policies and processes.  

Together, technology, people, and processes deliver insights and resilience. Read our solution guide, How to Build a More Resilient Business and Adaptable T&E Program, to further explore how the combination can make your company ready for change. 

Improving the Employee Experience 

Better solutions and processes simplify work and reduce frustration. Manual tasks are replaced by more engaging work for employees. Virtual assistants lead them through workflows and to compliance.  

Providing tools such as mobile apps empower employees on-the-go and remote work. When essential tasks like managing receipts and expense reports become less of a chore, your team’s satisfaction is likely to increase. And along with increasing productivity, that might make keeping and hiring talent less disruptive.  

Employees nowadays have concerns about well-being and sustainability. When booking a business trip, provide a solution that highlights greener choices or information about the neighborhood safety score to help them make a better decision. It’s every leader’s job to make the employee experience as good as it can be. With the right solution, you can make sure your ever-changing workforce feels satisfied and supported.  

Finally, Measure Progress 

Once you’ve developed a strategy for resilience, look to our Travel and Expense Benchmark Report to see how your business stacks up with top-performing SAP Customers around the world on goals involving spending compliance, visibility, employee safety, efficiency, and productivity. With your company’s own performance numbers in hand, you will have a baseline to track your progress and target improvements.  

_{^1. SAP Concur CFO Pulse Survey, 2023} 

_{^2. Empower the Future of Work with Intelligent Travel and Expense Solutions, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of SAP Concur, May 2023}