Streamline your marketing budget management

If you don’t have access to accurate marketing budget data, you can’t understand resource allocation, prioritise projects, or analyse marketing spend effectively.

With marketing budget software you can increase financial accountability across the marketing department so employees aren’t spending at will.

Instead, you can implement standardised processes to keep tight control of every cent and penny, all while allowing cardholders and budget owners to spend within a set framework.

If you’re looking for tools to help you organise, track, and optimise your marketing spending, you’ve come to the right place. Discover how to leverage finance tech to expose, monitor, and reallocate marketing budget spend to drive valuable business growth.

Why streamline your marketing budget management?

Streamlining the way you manage your marketing budget can put you in a great position for business growth, giving you accurate info for decision-making and saving you valuable time. Here are some of the biggest challenges and benefits:

• Centralising marketing budgets. By using one platform instead of ten, you can save time and achieve a centralised view of your spend. This central overview gives you the foresight to make spending decisions such as cutting costs, looking for alternative marketing tech suppliers, and generally evaluating the value derived from your marketing efforts.

• Global marketing spend visibility. Visibility over all global marketing spend empowers your budget owners to reallocate budget to bigger projects and manage all entities from afar. It’s not just your UK entity spending marketing budget; it’s all your other locations, too. By centralising spend in marketing budget software like Payhawk, you gain unrivalled financial transparency, putting you firmly in the driving seat.

Now, you’re better placed to identify spending patterns across entities, filter the data to get a better overview of spend at the department or individual level, quickly pinpoint duplicate vendor subscriptions, and instantly cap card spending limits — all to better manage marketing spend.

• Accessible, real-time data. To make insightful marketing decisions, you need access to real, up-to-date figures, otherwise it’s just guesswork. And centralising this data means that all data is accessible to those who need it — CMO, marketing manager, finance managers and leadership teams — you’re all looking at the same figures which helps mitigate data misinterpretation. Real-time marketing budget data puts everyone on the same page, instantly.

Say goodbye to marketing budget spreadsheets for good

We don’t need to tell you that budget spreadsheets are largely static documents. That means you can’t easily sync up data across your tech stack — think ERP, subscriptions, card payments, L&D budgets, campaigns, accounting or business travel tools. Instead, your data is siloed and opaque and relies on human intervention to manually update it, which can create multiple versions of the same data and lots of back and forth.

This process is riddled with errors and clumsy mistakes, and there’s simply no need to put up with these kinds of inefficiencies when you can use the right marketing budget tracking software.

If you’re thinking, can marketing budget spreadsheets really become a thing of the past? The answer’s yes. You can finally say goodbye to data discrepancies and outdated data with enhanced budget tracking tools like Payhawk.

What can you expect from this kind of software?

• Real-time budget tracking. Being able to track company budgets in real time is a game-changer for sure. As a Payhawk customer, you could access the Payhawk portal and see what funds you have left, upcoming or committed spend, and whether you’re close to your budget limit. From here, you can see what employees are spending money on and make decisive marketing decisions.

• Ability to set approval workflows. Implementing processes for different types of spend speeds up the expense approval process while removing the need to chase approvers manually. Instead, the approver receives a notification to take action, and the process automatically moves to the next step.

No matter how complex your approval process is, you can build them to suit your specific marketing department’s needs.

• Different budget dimensions. Budget dimensions are the parameters of the budget and, in Payhawk, you can have an infinite number of them. These dimensions give you granularity into company spending.

Payhawk budget dimensions include:

1. Categories. Being able to categorise your expenses with custom expense fields and categories ensures you can track all spending across different areas of the business. You might want to consider creating subcategories for your marketing expenses, including advertising, events, or PR.
2. Teams. Create custom team names e.g. marketing, performance marketing, events, and so on, to clearly track spend concerning certain departments.
3. Entities. Filter budget based on entities to ensure marketing spend alignment across the company.
4. Suppliers. See which suppliers you’re spending the most with and make changes to find alternative suppliers to keep costs low.
5. Employees. Set and analyse budgets at an employee level, see who’s spending the most and adjust card spending limits if necessary.
6. Custom fields. It’s always useful to build custom budget dimensions based on your work, i.e., project, location, etc. The custom fields can be anything you want, allowing you complete flexibility.

Key features to look for when choosing the right marketing budget software

1. Straightforward budgeting (aka forecasting). The ability to forecast business expenses is crucial to efficient and accurate budget management. With Payhawk Budgets, your marketing team leadership (or other budget owners) can get real-time access over budget utilisation to see where they stand.
2. Real-time spend. Accessing real-time card and invoice spend is a game-changer for marketing departments. When trialling a new campaign, you might want to make changes as it’s running to provide optimum results but to do that, you need to know what you can and can’t spend. Real-time spend gives you granular insight into what money has been spent and where.
3. Approval workflow designer. To make marketing spend more efficient, you can use Payhawk’s advanced workflow designer to craft expense, invoice and purchase order approval workflows that align with your spending policies. No spend happens without following predefined spending rules from your finance team or marketing leadership, improving spending compliance across your marketing department.
4. A global solution rolled into one platform. Finding a platform that allows you to oversee all spend, across all entities — from accounts payable to expense management with physical and virtual corporate cards — means everyone is accessing a single source of truth. All spend data is accurate, and reliable and makes budget-led decisions easier.
5. Easy setup. After you’ve set up your Payhawk corporate cards, you can track spend immediately.
6. Customisable budget template. You’ll want to find a marketing budget software that makes it as easy as possible to build your budget template with the level of customisation you need to ensure it works for your organisation. You want to be able to recreate your budget as it is with no compromises.
7. A great support team. When you’ve got questions about how to start using a new feature, you need a reliable and knowledgeable support team that’s on hand to help you solve any problem.

Watch the video below to learn more.

Three tips to optimise your marketing spend

Optimising your marketing spend isn’t just a one-time task; this should be a regular occurrence.

Here are some tips on optimising your spend.

Implement data-driven decision making

When it comes to making marketing decisions, there’s no doubt you’re using data to drive campaign decisions — for example, let’s say you’re running an SEO-focused campaign; you’re probably glancing at Google Analytics to check if your campaign is generating valuable traffic. It should be no different when it comes to analysing marketing spend.

Data should drive every decision you make, whether it’s reallocating spend for other marketing projects, procuring new suppliers or amending the card limits for staff. Without data, these decisions become meaningless.

Pinpoint where you overspend

Many marketing teams are facing significant budget cuts, with 47.7% of marketing teams experiencing tighter budgets in the year to February 2024. If you’re looking to save pennies, then marketing budget software helps give you the insight to make the best cost-saving decisions without impacting growth.

Access to comprehensive marketing budget data means you’re no longer in the dark — you can quickly realise you’re haemorrhaging money and from where.

Howard Thompson, Global Financial Controller at GDS Group, says:

Our biggest benefit from using Payhawk is around the live real-time information we get in the business. It's really important to track all our expenses and costs for each event.

See what you have left in real-time

There’s nothing worse than guesswork when it comes to company spend.
When crafting compelling marketing campaigns, you might need to make quick decisions on spend to keep your campaigns reactive and reach their full potential.

A real-time view over spend means your funds and upcoming expenses are accurate and you can make on-the-spot decisions that positively impact your campaign results, keeping you out of the red and firmly in the black.

Future trends in marketing budget software

We've all witnessed the advancement in AI and machine learning — from automation to biometric security measures. And no doubt there are exciting developments on the horizon, with data suggesting the global AI market will reach $1.81 trillion by 2030.

At Payhawk, our features use machine learning and smart automation to save employees substantial time when submitting expenses. Our optical character recognition (OCR) technology automatically extracts important information from the receipt or invoice, so you don't need to worry about manual data entry.

Our three-way matching technology also makes spotting discrepancies effortless. Let's say you create a purchase order for an event banner. When you receive the banner, our smart system will check the PO, the invoice, and the receipt note to ensure all amounts and details match before payment is made.

If you're looking to streamline your marketing budget planning and effortlessly track marketing spend, the advanced technology our Payhawk platform uses can help you accurately forecast marketing spend and encourage accountable spending across departments.

The financial wellness app, Payflow, uses Payhawk to gain spend visibility over departmental expenses. Payflow Co-founder, Benoît Menardo says:

I like how Payhawk gives me control over different departments' expenses. I can tell that the Marketing team has X, the Sales one has Y, and the Operations one has Z. I use the solution a lot for spend control and to plan better from one month to the next.

Watch the full Payflow story, or let us know if you'd like to try our platform and book a personalised demo.