Sam Hewes
UK General Manager, Moss
During economic downturns, businesses must enforce discipline in all areas, particularly finance. Over the past couple of years, this has translated into intense scrutiny of spend and budgeting.
A new wave of smart spend management tools provides cross-functional capabilities that allow SMEs to control their costs more effectively. This provides an exciting opportunity to streamline a range of internal financial processes while saving precious time and money.
Gaining control over spend
As companies have become increasingly complex, so too have their costs. Finance teams are faced with a web of transactions, spread across different departments, projects, timeframes and accounts. This raises all sorts of issues for budgeting, reconciliation and month-end closing.
Spend management tools tackle this on multiple fronts. Smart corporate cards can be issued for specific departments, projects or even employees. Each card can be set with custom budgets, spending rules and expense approval flows. Companies get direct control over exactly how money is spent, and where it is going, eliminating a huge amount of uncertainty in business planning processes.
The wealth of data provided by smart
spend management tools is essential
for developing better financial insights.
Automated finance is a partner, not a threat
Smart spend management software also equips finance teams to automate or semi-automate part of their workload using machine learning and artificial intelligence. This saves time and money by effectively outsourcing work to the software itself.
This has naturally driven fears about data security and finance jobs becoming obsolete. However, automated finance tools are perfectly poised to enhance finance roles — not replace them. For example, Pay.UK estimates that SMEs spend, on average, 3.4 hours a week manually reconciling payments. It is precisely these repetitive tasks where automation excels; not only are automated systems more accurate but they’re also much quicker.
Better decision-making
The wealth of data provided by smart spend management tools is essential for developing better financial insights. Expenditure can be tracked by card, project or individual budget item, and then fed to accounting software via direct integration. This is a step change over conventional payment methods that lack real-time, granular spend data.
At Moss, we’ve developed a suite of spend management and accounting tools specifically to help SMEs and their finance teams work more effectively. We help businesses reduce their finance workloads, improve their financial decision-making and free up time for more valuable work.
