It’s crucial to streamline your finances, particularly travel, expense, and invoice spend management. Our research highlights the benefits of integrating your spend management systems, allowing you to focus more on your shoppers and less on financial chaos. Here’s how connected spend management can revolutionize your retail business:
1. Stay in Control of Cash Flow
Effective cash flow management is essential for smooth retail operations, especially when dealing with merchandise buying, allocation, and replenishment. According to our Spend Management Report, 30% of retailers identified cash flow control as a top priority for their finance teams in the upcoming year. Common challenges include errors, payment delays, and manual processes. By connecting and automating spend management across travel, expense, and invoicing, you streamline processes and eliminate time-consuming data entry. From January sales to the festive December rush, you’ll have a clear view of your budget, enabling you to spot VAT reclaim opportunities and reinvest money into your business.
2. Eliminate Late Payments
Late payments disrupt cash flow, incur penalties, and weaken supply chain relationships. On average, it takes retailers 27 days to pay suppliers after receiving an invoice, with only 19% confident in their timely payments. However, improvements in invoice, expense, and travel systems have enabled 61% of retailers to achieve faster payments and reduced costs. An efficient, connected approach to spend management enhances your supply chain and ensures timely payments.
3. Save Time, Money, and Employee Effort
Manual processing of documents, data entry, and detail capture can be tedious and affect employee satisfaction, especially during peak seasons. Despite this, few retailers have fully automated systems. Only 6% have entirely automated travel bookings, 8% have automated employee expenses, and just 18% and 12% have automated accounts payable and financial analysis, respectively. Automating these processes saves time, reduces errors, and improves overall efficiency.
4. Boost Efficiency and Grow Your Business
Business efficiency is a common New Year’s resolution for retailers. Only 21% are fully confident in the thorough checking of travel and expense claims, and just 12-13% audit all claims and invoices for duplication, errors, and fraud. During critical business periods like Christmas, focusing on customers rather than expenses and invoices is vital. Managing spend through one automated system minimizes data-entry errors and manual tasks, allowing you to capitalize on the holiday shopping surge.
5. Gain Visibility for Informed Decisions
Without visibility into finances and spend, making informed business decisions is challenging. A connected approach to spend management provides a holistic view, which 62% of retailers believe could improve their travel, expense, and invoice systems. Centralized visibility of company-wide spend reduces time spent on processes, cash flow concerns, and late payments, enabling strategic development. Effective data management and reporting control costs and identify spending patterns, ensuring confident decision-making.
Conclusion
Implementing connected spend management is crucial for retailers looking to enhance efficiency, control costs, and improve customer focus. By integrating travel, expense, and invoice management systems, retailers can streamline processes, eliminate errors, and make informed decisions. Embrace connected spend management to ensure your retail business thrives all year round.
