How to Enhance Efficiency and Transparency through Spend Management

Businesses are demanding more from their C-Suite, accounting, and finance departments, and their teams as a whole. This increases the pressure to be even more agile and dynamic while attracting and retaining top talent. Outsourced finance, accounting, and advisory services can help relieve the strain leaders and teams feel when it comes to talent acquisition and management, relying on a consistent and technical team available in times of market volatility, and providing general relief of reporting-related stress.

Organizations utilizing outsourced accounting services can benefit from more than just reclaiming time; they gain expertise and save money. Utilizing a client accounting advisory services (CAS) team that focuses on spend management can greatly improve a business’s understanding of its current finances as well as its financial future. However, spend management goes beyond traditional expense management; it’s managing cash flow in real time, providing more transparency for your business and your customers.

Capturing real-time cash flow includes tracking employee spending, recurring spending, working capital, and other expenditures as they are incurred – no more waiting weeks or months to find out total spending numbers. The CAS team will utilize technology to assist with and automate the capturing and tracking of the organization’s spend. Utilizing card-based spend management allows firms to capture spending information faster, speeds up the closing process, and allows for controls to monitor users’ spending. With this and other tools, we can analyze in one centralized location all of the organization’s funds, providing financial team leaders with full visibility of cash flow and the ability to identify waste, ensure the budget is being stuck to, and forecast trends.

So, what is the value added by spend management? Aside from the increased spend visibility, transparency, and real-time forecasting, spend management can provide greater efficiency through the automation of manual processes, improved supplier/vendor relationships, ensuring the organization is sticking with the budget in real-time, and the ability to factor in Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) considerations with procurement and supply chain choices.

The spend management approach reduces the time-consuming, manual, reactive processes so we can work with you to focus on providing proactive advisory services to support your business needs. To learn more about spend management or how CAS services can benefit your organization, please contact Anthony Carrella, Partner and Leader of Anchin’s CAS Group, or your Anchin Relationship Partner.