How to achieve spend control across multiple entities

In today's economy, squeezing every penny from your funds and budgets is more important than ever. You know that the money you spend on products, services, and labour isn't just a number on a spreadsheet; it's a resource that can help you make or break your business, survive, and scale.

But what if you have multiple entities that have separate budgets? And what if one of them overspent in one area and needs to cut back elsewhere? How do you manage all of this activity in one place? That's where multi-entity spend management comes into play.

Access to adequate spending funds is a great competitive advantage for any business. But, it's also a responsibility. The complexity of managing multiple entities can make it difficult to analyse if you're allocating business funds appropriately.

And if you can't see or control your spend easily, how can you avoid wasteful spending, or make impactful decisions about which levers to pull in your business and where?

How to achieve multi-entity spend control?

Corporate expense management is one of the most important yet overlooked areas of finance. Whether you’re controlling a $1 million budget or a $100 million budget, it’s critical to understand where your money is going, how it’s spent, and how much money you have left.

Multi-entity management provides a single source of truth for all spend data, making it easier to track expenses across multiple entities (departments or subsidiaries) and giving you a clearer picture of where, how, and why money is being spent.

At Payhawk, we’ve built our platform to help finance teams save time and solve spend control challenges. Our multi-entity management functionality makes it easy for finance teams to control and manage their spend and liquidity at scale across hundreds of employees and multiple entities.

Expense visibility for better insight into company spend

Get better corporate spend visibility by seeing what other entities are spending and in what categories. This visibility will help you identify opportunities for cost savings and decision-making that can help optimise cash flow.

The ability to easily view, search and analyse spending across multiple entities means your finance team can be more proactive about identifying wasteful spending that could otherwise go unnoticed. Once you know where your money is going, you can take action to reduce costs — like renegotiating contracts with vendors — which creates more room in the budget for other things.

Multi-entity spend management to optimise cash flow

Managing your organisation’s spend across multiple entities lets you prioritise your spending, and make smarter decisions about where to invest your resources. You can identify opportunities for savings by comparing your company’s actual spending with benchmark data, such as industry averages.

Furthermore, the Group Dashboard is a powerful tool for managing cash flow across entities and allows you to spot potential problems early on and take action to avoid them.

With the Group Dashboard, you can see:

• Current balances for all entities, currencies, and accounts
• All upcoming payments
• Low balance warnings for all upcoming payments

Streamline invoice management across multiple groups

At Payhawk, our solution supports subscription management, Accounts Accounts Payable (AP), corporate cards, expense management, and more. You can automatically pay suppliers on time, keep tabs on outstanding invoices, and eliminate errors to ensure your payments are reconciled correctly and quickly.

On an entity level, you can:

• Streamline AP across your entities
• Quickly check what outstanding information remains in each entity
• View the number of expenses that need action, such as approval or payment, and take appropriate action to resolve them

One solution to all your multi-entity expense management problems

With growth comes complexity, making it harder to keep tabs on everything. The solution? A multi-entity management solution that acts as a single platform allows you to manage enterprise spend in one place.

Find out how your business can achieve group-level spend control across multiple entities. Book a demo today.