The bigger your business gets, the more vendors and suppliers you need, and the more bills they send. It can almost feel like a bunch of clutter. Just because you received a bill from a company doesn’t mean that the amount is accurate or agreed upon.
John Wanamaker, a pioneer in marketing, once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” He lived from 1838 to 1922.
Today, we use business spend management to avoid wasteful spending. That’s why so many enterprise businesses are turning to cloud-based spend management software to track spending.
Do you think that your small business could benefit from doing a better job tracking the way it spends? Here is what you need to know to understand business spend management.
Business Spend Management Explained
BSM, or business spend management, is where business processes, supported by software, come together to track how employees spend revenue. This includes procurement, invoices, and expenses.
Beyond that, BSM manages contract lifecycles, inventory, advanced sourcing, supplier information, budgeting, and analytics.
You can look at business spend management as community intelligence across the entire business. Tools like Bentoforbusiness.com simplify processes for better expense management. Say goodbye to cutting checks, reconciling receipts, reimbursing employees, and managing petty cash.
The Benefits of Business Spend Management
When you track spending, you get a bird’s eye view of what is going on in the organization. BSM tracks data, so you can see spending patterns. You’ll get insight into the following:
- Track where money is going
- Free up capital by cutting bloated budgets
- Reduce risk with partners and third parties
- Create benchmarks
Leadership relies on the ability to make informed decisions to create better efficiency for the entire company. If you are looking to cut the budget and need to know where, business spend management offers a data-driven answer.
BSM works with the other software that you use, like your ERP (enterprise resource planning), HCM (human capital management), and CRM (customer relationship management). This way, you can address the way the entire company is operating by combining everything into one.
Purchasing and Vendor Relationships
A tremendous benefit of improving your spend management is that it will help you keep better track of your purchasing and vendor relationships. You will leverage technology to automate spending.
From procurement to P2P, the way your company buys products and solutions from vendors will go according to plan. You can compensate according to the terms of the contract.
E-procurement software gives your leaders the real-time spend data they need to attain better visibility with business finances. You can improve your operations and your budgets with more knowledge about where all the money is going.
We Love Small Businesses
Now that you know more about what is involved with a software tool like business spend management, you will make more informed decisions about business finances.
We will continue to publish new, timely articles like this one to keep you posted on what’s going on in the business world. Be sure to check us out again soon.
