Why Finance is Important to Involve in Spend Management Solutions

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL2zAtPdHD49_mXZOIQOhpYwV20oAfSVAO&v=fgvyztnB0eY autoplay:0]

This week on Tuesdays with Talia, Eved's CEO & Founder shares a few lessons she learned from a recent client excursion. You'll be surprised to hear who your most unexpected internal champions for change may be. Watch now!

I was onsite with a client this week approaching division controllers to get their “ok” for a spend management solution that would create efficiencies and opportunities for procurement and meetings. Initially we didn’t think to include finance because we didn’t want to mess with their processes. This particular client actually wanted to go to finance earlier asking about the issues they face to see if we could solve them together. Some of their issues were:

• Visibility: Finance approves invoices and purchase orders but they don’t have visibility into who the supplier is, what they’re spending it, etc.
• Controls: Controls aren’t always enforced. For example, if a planner had budgeted for 10 airfares but only uses 8, they spend those dollars other places. Or certain meetings don’t have approval for food and beverage but finance has no way to manage that.
• Poor use of meeting planners time and skill set: Planners receive a large 5 or 6-figure budget that’s approved up front but then the planning process and procuring of suppliers goes into a black hole. The information sits on a single planner’s desktop and they’re using excel to manage costs. Planners are meant to be experience builders, they shouldn’t be hired or used for their finance and reconciliation skills.

When a lot of the budgeting and reconciliation is being done manually by a planner and there’s no visibility into the spend and it creates a sense of risk from a finance perspective, creating a lot of concern.

When my client and I approached division controls, my client introduced a new spend management system that creates efficiencies for their team so they can better service their customer and it will create new levels of visibility into the granularity of what was spent and actual visibility during the planning of the event. From a compliance stand point, by bringing the planning process online and automating quotes, scopes, invoices and payments it created a sense of control and compliance that finance is seeking.

By presenting a spend management solution to the finance team at an earlier stage in the evaluation process, it switched from a “are you ok with this?” perspective to having their full buy-in to solving a problem that they too experience with the meeting and event category. 

 Whether you’re in procurement and looking to make huge changes to gain visibility into your spend or you’re in a meeting-event marketing program, talk to finance team about their struggles and what they want to see out of the department. I think you’ll be vastly surprised at how supportive they are in helping you find a solution that brings truly clear visibility, control, compliance and efficiency to the meeting and event category.