SAP Concur has released Budget, a solution that provides organisations with actionable, near real-time budget data to help improve resource management and decision-making, and to strengthen the bottom line.
The Budget solution synthesises data from other SAP Concur solutions, including Expense, Invoice, Purchase Request, and Travel Request, enabling finance leaders, sales leaders, and project managers to see spending as it unfolds.
While traditional budget solutions have lacked the flexibility, organisational scale, and ease-of-use required to meet the needs of businesses, Budget is designed to help organisations to move beyond monthly budget spreadsheets and manage spending before and after the expenditures takes place.
The solution enables organisations to hold employees accountable as they seek to eliminate overspending, while employees can proactively adjust their spending to take advantage of unexpected opportunities.
Key features include providing easily consumed data tailored to the needs of individual employees, enabling organisations to gain corporate control of expenditures by integrating with financial systems via a public API.
The Budget solution allows users to have easy access to their expenditures with access to performance dashboards on both mobile and web, as well as budget insights embedded directly at the point of expense or invoice approval.
Budget enables individual employees to customise the solution to their own needs, such as setting predetermined limits on budget buckets, setting up personalised budget sub-categories, or receiving auto-email alerts when budget thresholds have been reached.
The solution also enables organisations to establish customisable budget approval workflows, user permissions, and audit rules to help maintain policy decisions across the organisation.
Organisations should take heed of this important issue. A recent Oxford Economics report found that, in the last 15 years, corporate travel spending has doubled to more than $1.2 trillion and employee-initiated expenditures are the second-largest expense faced by organisations. At the same time, a recent Gartner report found that CFOs require better technology to enable timely analysis and decision-making, monitor performance, and inform business decisions using quality data. Budget may be just what organisations have been waiting for.
