EIU Report: In Tech-Led Pursuit of Sound Financial Footing

The global economy is expected to shrink or show stagnating growth in the near term as lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to impact the world’s population and business environment. Estimates of the contraction in global GDP and cumulative output losses during 2020 and 2021, make clear that organizations looking to better manage the crisis would do well to ensure they are operating the soundest financial footing possible.

A recent survey conducted by SAP Concur and The Economist Group discovered the following:

• 93% of global executives agree that maintaining organizational agility is the only way to navigate uncertainty
• 95% of executives say that using real-time data analytics has helped their organizations ensure that spend and operations align with company goals
• 91% of executives agree that technology-driven expense management systems are key to ensuring consistent application of policies and protocols across the business

The call for smarter spend management is only growing stronger, highlighting a need for tools such as sophisticated expense management software that can strengthen a company’s ability to better manage spending by delivering business outcomes in three areas: increased efficiency and productivity, greater visibility into spending, and hardwiring of processes that ensure adherence to spending policies.

Given the havoc the crisis has wreaked on a human and economic scale, recovery will likely be slow and unique to organizations, industries and countries. One Commonality, however, is that the economic fallout of the pandemic has raised the bar for organizations to not just track spending, but to ensure that tracking is delivering true visibility into spend.

Visibility leads to data driven decision making to increase productivity and efficiency, especially when accompanied by effective processes that ensure that spending is aligned with company policies. Corporate spending innovations today are essential for aligning organizations with their strategic priorities.

Download the report to learn how global executives lean on the deployment of technology to help organizations stay on sound financial footing during the pandemic.