4 Best Practices for Spend Management at Global Enterprises

In an increasingly global world, a unified approach to spend management can allow your organization to streamline financial operations, while ensuring accurate reporting and reducing manual work. 

Managing global spend across multiple entities comes with unique challenges. From disabling information silos to managing various regional accounting policies, it can be a complex task to maintain consistency and transparency across multiple entities. By implementing a few best practices, though, companies can streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and achieve better visibility into their global spend.  

In this blog post, we will discuss four key practices that can help manage global spend effectively.  Our new guide, The Challenges of Managing Global Spend and the Power of Unified Expense Management, unpacks even more.

1. Eliminate Information Silos

Information silos occur when data is isolated within specific departments or entities, hindering collaboration and creating inefficiencies. To overcome this challenge, it is crucial to implement multi-entity accounting and spend management software that centralizes data. By having a single source of truth, all stakeholders can access real-time information, eliminating the need for manual data gathering and reducing the chances of errors. Breaking down barriers to information enhances collaboration, enables better decision-making, and ensures consistency across entities.

2. Create Cross-Functional Transparency

Transparency is vital to managing the global spend of multi-entity companies. Cloud-based software solutions are a powerful tool to help your organization achieve transparency by providing access to information for all stakeholders across the globe. Cloud-based platforms allow real-time data sharing, reporting, and analytics, enabling teams from different locations to collaborate seamlessly. This transparency improves communication, enhances accountability, and facilitates efficient decision-making at all levels of the organization — wherever they work.

3. Standardize Accounting Policies

To ensure consistency and compliance across multiple entities, it is essential to standardize accounting policies. Establishing a set of global accounting policies ensures that all entities follow the same fundamental principles. However, it is important to recognize that local rules and regulations may require some customization. By striking a balance between global standardization and local adaptability, companies can maintain uniformity in financial reporting while adhering to local requirements. This approach streamlines consolidation efforts and facilitates accurate financial analysis.

4. Automate Data Collection and Consolidation

Data collection and consolidation can be a time-consuming and error-prone process when performed manually. Implementing automation tools and systems can significantly streamline these tasks, freeing up the finance team to focus on more value-added activities such as forecasting and analysis. By automating repetitive tasks — like receipt collection, transaction matching, and entering data into the general ledger — companies can reduce errors, increase efficiency, and enhance the accuracy of financial data.

The Future of Global Spend Management

Effectively managing global spend for multi-entity companies requires a strategic approach that addresses the challenges of dismantling information silos, creating transparency, standardizing accounting policies, and automating data collection. 

By adopting multi-entity accounting and spend management software, companies can eliminate information silos and establish a single source of truth. Cloud-based platforms enable transparency by providing real-time access to information for stakeholders across the globe. Standardizing accounting policies ensures consistency while considering local requirements. Finally, automating data collection and consolidation frees up finance team resources for more strategic financial tasks. 

To learn more, download our new guide The Challenges of Managing Global Spend.

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Sarah Murphy

Sarah is a Content Manager for Mesh Payments. Before working in marketing, she completed her Master of Journalism degree at Toronto Metropolitan University (f.k.a. Ryerson University) and worked as an arts journalist in Toronto. She was a content writer for tech companies in the retail and workforce management sectors before joining Mesh in 2022.