The financial impact from the COVID-19 pandemic is considerable. However, the challenges are not insurmountable. To have the best chance of returning to more prosperous times, businesses need to watch every penny very carefully.
Controlling costs involves making big decisions such as furloughing people, postponing new hires or delaying investments. Controlling costs is also about smaller decisions, such as being careful about everything you spend, day-to-day.
Why saving costs every day is hard
Unfortunately, many businesses are not well equipped to do this. One of the main reasons is that spend is only visible late, usually after the month-end. For example, most businesses only know by mid April what was spent in March, by which time it is too late to do anything about it.
There are other factors that make spend hard to control in a timely fashion. Employees make commitments to suppliers based on month old budgets. Expenses are often submitted weeks or months late. And company card statements are only reviewed at the end of the month. All of this obscures the view of seeing accurate, up to date figures across all company expenditure.
Real time visibility is required to find savings
What is needed is real time visibility into spend. That shouldn’t be just for the finance team or CEO. Anyone in the company responsible for managing budgets should be able to see up to date spend information. Only individual budget owners or project managers know what is essential and what is not, so they are best placed to find savings.
This doesn’t mean you need more finance software. In fact, you need fewer systems. The more information is spread out in silos across different systems, the harder it is to see. Ideally, you want a single view, where everyone can track all spend in real time.
The limitations of accounting systems
The accounting system unfortunately isn’t that system. If it was, this problem would already have been solved years ago.
One reason is that your accounting system doesn’t get spend information in real time. Another is that you wouldn’t want all managers in your company logging into your accounting system! Even if you did, they wouldn’t want to, because accounting systems aren’t designed to be used by non-finance people.
What you need is a system that has real time information, contains all spend versus budget information, and is safe and easy for non-finance people to use. Like all the best modern software that provides real business value, you want it to be realistically priced, fast to implement, and flexible enough to adjust to your business processes.
A new way to control costs
At Yordex we set out to build exactly that: online software that provides real time visibility to control costs and cash flow.
We brought together expenses, PO’s, invoice scanning and budgets into one system to give you visibility into all spend. We added company cards and payouts to make sure the data is always up-to-date. The system was designed to be easy to use for both finance and non-finance people and it is modular to allow you to use only what you need.
The resulting service provides greater visibility and control over spend than ERP systems at a cost that is an order of magnitude lower. You may even be able to save on costs, because you can get rid of other finance tools you may be using, such as expense management, invoice scanning or PO approvals.
We are not done yet! We continue to add more services to give you visibility into all finances.
Fast Return on Investment
Our customers are seeing immediate benefits. Adam Goodwin, Group Financial Controller at Hammerhead VR says “Since introducing Yordex we’ve managed to reduce our total spend on expenses by 50% by increasing visibility and accountability with employees.“
Adam is not the only one. There is a fast growing group of customers that are relying on Yordex software to help them through these difficult times.
According to Remco Rausch, Enterprise Product Manager at LoveCrafts: “We chose Yordex because of their flexibility and because we think their approach of providing a single source of the truth between us and our suppliers is the best way for us to automate invoice processing.”
Yordex is a leading provider of smart spend management solutions that adapts to your rules. Book a demo or sign up now to get started.