Standardisation: How to create efficient expense processes across entities

Management information (MI) is important to help make sense of company spend and measure business performance. The ability to easily report and analyse data is crucial for forecasting future spend, making informed decisions, and managing resources across the global organisation.

The issue with MI and global businesses arises when different entities often have different processes and systems (which is often the case). For example, a company's multiple entities might use different accounting software or financial transaction tools.

Standardisation can drastically cut this complexity by enabling all entities to report on the same set of metrics. This is particularly important if you have subsidiaries or branches in different countries where local laws and regulations may require additional reporting. By standardising how you manage your multi-entity businesses, you can reduce the resources needed to handle them and improve overall performance.

Why is standardisation in multi-entity management important?

Standardisation is critical to managing the relationships between the various entities that make up a business. It ensures that all parties use standard processes and have similar expectations, minimising confusion and conflict. In addition, standardised processes will ensure that your team can consistently capture critical MI to reduce errors and increase peak performance. Standardising expense types and fields across entities can bring several benefits, for example, including:

Compliance: Standardisation (including approval workflows, card freezes, and more) ensures employees can submit expenses that comply with company policies and regulations, reducing the risk of errors and fraud.

Consistency: Finance teams and employees across all entities get access to the same expense types and fields, making submitting expenses accurately and on time easier.

Efficiency: No need to configure expense settings individually for each entity, creating duplicative work

Reporting: With standardised expense types and fields, companies can generate accurate and meaningful MI that can help inform decision-making and increase efficiency in the business.

Control and manage spend and liquidity at scale

Our multi-entity management functionality makes it easy for finance teams to control and manage their spend and liquidity at scale across hundreds or thousands of employees and multiple entities. Finance leaders can easily set workflows, track transactions, and understand spending across their subsidiaries. It also allows your finance teams to collaborate on projects from anywhere using real-time data from across your organisation.

With full visibility into spend across all entities, you can identify opportunities for cost reduction, better cash-flow management, and streamline processes to optimise your overall spend management strategy.

Build workflows at the group level and apply across entities

With Payhawk's new multi-entity management features, you can standardise your multi-entity management processes by building workflows at the group level and applying them across your company's multiple entities. And you can still customise where necessary to cater to different entities' requirements, such as specific spend approvers.

Plus, you can manage your group workflows from one overview, see which entities have group workflows applied, and easily edit workflows before applying them to all entities if required.

Submit expenses on time and close the month faster

Make it easy for employees to submit compliant expenses on time. With a centralised solution, you can manage all aspects of employee expenses so that it's simple for employees to follow your processes without having to jump through hoops or spend hours trying to figure things out on their own.

Employees can submit expenses from their laptops or phones, even on the go. Our easy-to-use app and portal, and leading-class OCR tech for receipt capture and pre-accounting automation, make capturing spend data simple and fast.

You can even close the year more quickly. Our multi-entity spend management tool lets you close your fiscal year faster by providing visibility into employee expenses and efficient real-time reconciliation.

Key takeaways

Multi-entity management simplifies expenses by allowing businesses to centralise and standardise processes easily. This makes it easier to track spending across the board and reduces the need to chase spend data as it is captured correctly across the business in the first place.

Standardising expense submission with multi-entity management is critical for achieving peak efficiency and helps companies streamline their reporting and improve spend visibility.
With the right all-in-one multi-entity spend management system, companies can get greater accuracy and efficiency over data, better employee expense compliance, more spend control, and a lot of saved time.

Learn how your finance team can leverage the power of our multi-entity spend management system. Book a demo today.