Avoid risky screen-switching errors with multi-entity management

If you, like most large organizations, have business spend data spread across your business in multiple locations within multiple systems; you’ll likely want to consolidate your spend management into one user-friendly solution. Maybe you want more robust visibility and improved insights? Or perhaps you want better control over cash flow and how your spend is classified, managed, and analyzed?

Whatever the driving force, you understand the importance of having one clear view of multi-entity spending and one space where you control it.

Why is clear spend visibility important for large companies?

The benefits of clear spend visibility are obvious; Number one is that you and your finance team can view your group’s spending in one place. You can check top spenders by team and entity, from payments and invoices to subscriptions, without changing screens.

But what about the challenges? Most large companies want to improve their spend visibility, but with multiple legacy tools holding them back, they often don’t know where to start. If you haven’t already set up a future-facing system, here are a few of the most common issues:

• Lack of collaboration: It usually manifests as a 'siloed approach,' where each department or functional area has its own individual spending tool for tracking expenses (think Excel spreadsheets). This approach leads to disconnected data that doesn't provide a holistic view of your company's finances or spending activity. And because there isn't a single platform for all departments, it's harder to create reports showing how much money is being spent across different areas or teams — like marketing versus research — which makes it difficult to compare apples-to-apples figures across different groups within your organization
• Scale: Large companies have lots of employees, which means a lot of expenses. If you're managing thousands of employees across multiple locations, it can be challenging to keep track of who is spending what and where
• Accurate reporting: In addition to spend visibility, another challenge for large companies is accurate reporting. With so many employees submitting expense reports across multiple locations, there must be a system in place to verify their requests before they get paid

Multi-entity spend management: The big picture through a single view

Multi-entity management tracks your groups' spend across entities allowing you to manage global business spend more effectively. It gives you more control over how you manage suppliers, helps you avoid common pitfalls like duplicate payments or late invoices, and gives you visibility into every transaction in real-time.

Multi-entity management also helps you optimize your spend visibility across multiple entities. At Payhawk, our multi-entity management feature includes a powerful Group Dashboard that lets you view all your group's spend in one view. You can see reimbursements, invoices, corporate card payments, subscriptions, and more all in one place, with no need to keep switching between screens.

Controlling cash flow and speeding up month-end

Cash flow management can get out of control very quickly without a single view of spend. Before multi-entity management, businesses needed help to see what they had spent and where and moved between tools or screens inefficiently to check the latest.

Our multi-entity management features not only give you a view overspend but let you save time with actionable insights and tasks to keep things moving. You get:

• A warning for when your balance is low (across all currencies and entities)
• A clear view of upcoming spend vs. current funds
• Information on what tasks still need actioning, e.g., number of incomplete approvals, missing receipts
• Automated receipt chasing (no need to wait until month-end)

Plus, your entities don’t need to share invoices, make loans across subsidiaries, or trade with each other, as you can manage cash flow across all of your entities in one place to ensure that each entity has enough funds to perform as they need.

Save time on group admin

Spending too much time updating systems in order to support group spend management? Save time and effort with our Group Employee Module, so you can focus on more strategic revenue-boosting tasks instead.

With the Group Employee Module, you can check how many users and employees you have and invite individuals in bulk to save yourself from manually adding users individually.

You can also add team managers and expense approvers at a Group Level to ensure each entity's approval layers are correctly built within your spend policy. Changes in the team or leadership? You can easily edit or delete teams at the group level and even invite the same manager to all your entities as required, avoiding the otherwise repetitive admin of adding them.

Need to give oversight to a Group Financial Controller? You can assign Group Admins with the team to ensure that the right team member has oversight and control over all your entities.

Harness the power of the Group Dashboard

If your organization has multiple entities, you can now easily manage them all from a single platform. Whether you need to view expenses by team or entity, our multi-entity management feature, including the powerful Group Dashboard, allows you to do so in one place.

The Group Dashboard shows you the top spenders and top spending entities, making it easy to identify which teams or individuals are most active with their money and where they are spending it. You can also see total spend across all entities, making saving money, controlling cash flow easy, and providing the right insight to set budgets and update policies.

A quick search feature lets you filter all of your group's data on the fly by entity name so that you only see what matters most.

Put money and time to good use

Multi-entity management is a powerful model for improving spend visibility, controlling cash flow, and streamlining business processes. It can also allow an organization to reduce costs by eliminating duplicate actions and operations across the business.

Multinational companies often have multiple legal entities, each with its own set of employees and accounting information. Our multi-entity spend management feature helps to manage all your company's entities and improve overall spend visibility. In addition to having access to the spend data at a group level, we also let you issue corporate cards (credit and debit), track mileage, create per diems, and manage out-of-pocket expenses.

Keep your business running smoothly by managing global spend with ease, improving visibility, and improving your cash flow in the process. Book a demo today to learn more.