One of the most important things to ensure in your business is that you have the highest level of control over your corporate spend.
Whilst this can be challenging to achieve, the best way to do this is to use spend management software.
In this article, we’ve put together a complete guide on what spend management software is and how you can find the best platform to implement it in your business.
What is spend management software?
Spend management software is an excellent business tool that gives you a more effective way of tracking, analyzing, and most importantly, controlling your corporate spend.
Using your spend management software, you’ll have a more organized and accurate way of gathering and structuring various data surrounding your company’s spend. On top of this, you’ll have a range of intricate features that help you adjust and dissect your corporate spend, so it’s optimized for your company.
What to look for in the best spend management software
In order to find the best spend management software, there are a few things you should look for in your chosen platform. This includes:
One of the most important things to look for in your spend management software is that it gives you full visibility on your corporate spend.
You must ensure that you can easily track every transaction that takes place throughout your business, and receive this data in real-time. This gives full accuracy on your payment data, and helps you see a full picture of how your company is spending money. The data provided by your software will cover each transaction extensively, offering record of things such as the times of each payment, how much was spent, what was purchased, and which card the payment came from.
This will increase your corporate spend visibility, and offer further analysis of your transactions.
You also need to make sure your chosen spend management platform offers a vast range of spend controls for your company transactions.
These features will help give you full control over how, where, and in what capacity money is spent across every area of your business.
One example of these spend controls is the ability to set spend limits on your payments. This means that any transactions which exceed a specified amount will be stopped from completing.
These limits can be varied across your company – for instance, this is can include different limits for certain cards, purchase types, and teams within the business. This helps you ensure every area is optimizing their spending, and staying within any budgets which have been set for them.
It’s also important to make sure your spend management software offers a variety of payment insights for every transaction. These insights will provide useful information on your corporate spend, and show you all the ways you could improve it.
For example, one of the many insights you should look for in your software, is where your platform informs you of any cheaper alternatives to payment’s you’re currently making.
Your software can show you other companies offering a similar service to what you’re paying for, but at a cheaper price.
Insights like this can help you maintain the highest level of cost-efficiency throughout your business, and, in turn, improve how your money is spent.
With this expert guide on spend management software, make sure you find the right platform that’s best for you, to regain full control of your business’s corporate spend.