Ever wonder why is Finance always at the back of the queue for investment? The one common characteristic of every finance team is that it is always crazy busy. This is exacerbated each month-end in the scramble to get everything processed to produce the month-end accounts, management information pack, and quarterly VAT returns as well as the annual pain of year-end and the subsequent audit. Most finance departments are becoming increasingly frustrated by their inability to evolve and adopt better methodologies simply because there are always “more important” projects for the corporate cash and available resources. Unfortunately, it is equally […]
The best way to cut your PO approval time
When I first joined Compleat, I discovered that some products dedicated to automating the purchase process were tackling problems I had never dealt with in my career as a marketer, but not CompleatOrder. That one hit home. Here at Compleat, we organise quite a few events every year: In 2016, we exhibited at Charity Finance Summit, the Business Show, and FinTech Connect Live. For each event, I had to deal with many different suppliers, some offering the same products, and some others providing services we could purchase from other suppliers we already had done business with. How could I stay […]
Calling all budget holders: It is time to take your budget into your own hands
Hi there, Budget Holder, let’s be candid, your finance department doesn’t to do a lot to help you manage your budget or spend. Perhaps more worrying is the fact that they believe everything regarding finance works just fine. As you probably already know, this simply is not the case. There are no corporate systems to make it simple to capture and track everything you buy, manage your budgets, plan for future spend and manage costs against projects, so each of you must improvise. To manage spend against budget, you must create and then update your own spreadsheets with everything you […]
This is the way all executives want to manage their budgets
How would you like to be able to work like this? You are electronically notified of a supplier’s invoice arrival waiting for you to approve it; you review it in detail (by looking at it on whatever device you choose), then simply “click or tap” to either approve or deny the invoice. If you are the final approver, the invoice is immediately posted directly to your accounting system, ready for timely payment. But it does not end there. You also have real-time dashboards and comprehensive reports about every supplier, how much you spend with them, what the expense was for […]
Finance Managers: Why is e-invoicing “a step too far”?
Don’t answer that – it is a standard “no win” question. But unfortunately, it is also increasingly applicable to any finance department that is still processing paper invoices. The emotional challenge for finance people is that the paper invoice represents the critical source document for everything that is bought or sold and their entire career experience has been founded on the paper invoice being sacrosanct. So, it is not surprising that senior finance executives faced with the proposal of removing all the paper invoices use the term “a step too far”. So, what is the problem? The common reasons for the “step too […]