Imagine wrapping up the financial year only to discover a hidden pile of invoices for services that don’t contribute to your current objectives. These unplanned expenses not only disrupt your financial balance but also offer little to no value to your business.
By adopting spend management best practices, you can avoid such pitfalls, gaining greater control, visibility, and standardisation across all expenditures.
In this post, we’ll explore what spend management entails, the benefits it brings to your business, and how to effectively implement it.
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Spend management is the set of practices that enable you to manage expenditure in line with company objectives, enhancing operational efficiency, maximising value, reducing costs and minimising financial risk across multiple currencies and global transactions.
It involves the strategic planning, execution, and monitoring of your expenses to ensure that they align with your company’s overall objectives. This includes managing both direct and indirect spend, such as inventory, marketing and employee expenses, to optimise cash flow and reduce costs.
Effective spend management is crucial to maintaining financial stability and achieving your business goals.
Some of the key advantages of implementing effective spend management strategies include:
Spend management gives you a clear view of where your money is going.
Without it, much of your data is invisible or scattered across multiple files and formats, making it hard to get an accurate understanding of total spend. With spend management, it’s easier to pinpoint what’s efficient, what’s not, and what you need to address.
Spend management is about more than just allocating budget: it ensures all your expense data is tracked, structured, and available for future reference. This helps you identify spend patterns and figure out where you’re getting the best ROI. Streamlining processes and eliminating inefficiencies can also bring cost savings, which can be reinvested into your business activities.
With increased visibility over your spend and optimised financial processes, you can better manage your cash flow and reduce your risk of financial instability.
Minimising wasteful spending also allows for more efficient resource allocation. For example, by reallocating funds from redundant subscriptions to high-impact projects, you can drive business growth more effectively.
Effective spend management makes it easier for department heads to stick to their budgets.
Regularly monitoring spending against your budget should allow you to make adjustments as needed, which can help prevent overspending or investment in the wrong areas.
With structured data at your fingertips, you can gain valuable insights into expenses across departments, suppliers and projects.
This allows for informed decision-making, which helps you identify cost-saving opportunities or areas where you need to make cuts.
Spend management can save you time. Automating manual expense tracking and approval processes can free your employees up to focus on more high-value activities.
As well as saving time, spend management can improve accuracy and reduce the burden on your finance team. They often spend hours chasing and matching invoices with receipts, trying to control employee card spend and match up data to business performance. With spend management tools, this can be done faster and without human error.
For example, Juni enables operational efficiency through automations and 2500+ integrations. This includes features like accounts payable tools, invoice matching and reporting/analytics. It also allows you to centralise financial operations like media spend and reconciliation.
Spend management can also remove the friction of employees having to manually request approval for every purchase order, which can lead to greater efficiency.
Effective spend management can help reduce risk by ensuring that all your purchases align with your company's policies and strategic priorities, improving overall cost control. It can also help reduce errors in financial reporting and accounting, as well as identify and solve cash flow issues.
Enforcing spending policies and automating approval workflows can help maintain compliance. This reduces the risk of unauthorised or non-compliant spending, which helps you avoid potential fines and reputational damage.
Implementing robust expense tracking, approval workflows and auditing capabilities helps eliminate fraud and protects your business, as well as prevent maverick spend. This is when goods or services are purchased outside of established procurement processes, which can be a significant drain on your finances.
Tailored approval workflows, custom spending limits and compliance controls help ensure all purchases align with your company's policies and strategic priorities.
The right spend management solutions offer multiple benefits, but they’re not without their challenges, especially if you’re working manually. Let’s take a look at those next.
Managing spend across different locations, departments, or business units takes a high degree of organisation and oversight, not to mention a lot of time.
If your data is stored across multiple systems, it’s also very challenging to access and analyse it, which slows down and undermines the decision-making process.
The absence of a standardised classification system for spend categories can make it challenging to compare and benchmark data across departments or entities.
This also makes it difficult to see how your company is performing compared to others in the same industry.
Manual processes and disparate systems lead to inefficiencies, errors and delays, resulting in increased costs and decreased productivity.
Inefficient processes and manual tracking methods can also make it difficult to obtain real-time visibility into spending activities, which can impact your ability to make informed decisions about your spending.
A key barrier to procuring a spend management solution is that it can feel like a burden, because you have to add another ‘tool’ to your business.
This is because many spend management tools have limited financial capabilities, rarely integrate with your financial tech stack, and aren’t tailored to digital commerce businesses.
Data-driven decision-making is only as good as the data it's based on. If your data is incomplete, inconsistent or inaccurate, you can’t draw actionable insights from it.
Manually cleaning and structuring data takes a lot of time and effort. You’ll also need top analytics skills to identify and extract the right reports from collected spend data, which adds to your costs.
Spend management requires time and effort to identify, collect, and analyse data regularly. If your teams and systems aren’t set up to facilitate this, it can be a big drain on your resources.
Securing the budget for investment in spend management processes or software may also be challenging as you have to convince those holding the purse strings that it's worth the investment by showing them hard data.
Now you know the benefits and challenges of spend management, let’s look at how to set up efficient expense management in your organisation.
Before implementing spend management processes, you need to think about what you want to gain from doing so. For example, increase efficiency, reduce maverick spend, ensure better compliance?
Knowing this will put you in a better position to identify which areas to tackle first and whether your current systems and processes are sufficient. If not, you’ll need to look at investing in a dedicated spend management tool. In this case, being clear about your needs will help you choose the right platform.
Next, perform a thorough analysis of your current spending patterns and identify all your spending channels, direct and indirect.
Full visibility into where your money is going will help you find opportunities for optimisation and cost savings. You’ll also need to get control over supplier management, purchasing, expense reporting and approval workflows.
Relying on manual data entry, uploading invoices and using spreadsheets to structure and analyse information can increase your business risk and isn’t scalable.
For this reason, consider an automated platform like Juni that allows you to centralise your spend.
Juni collects and scans your invoices automatically, and you can choose to pay them immediately or get financing to pay them later. You can also manage your unpaid invoices and accounts payable processes using Juni, bringing all your financial admin under one roof.
By integrating with your existing tech stack and giving you a real-time view of your financial operations, Juni gives you access to the data you need to make fast, accurate decisions about cost control measures, multi-currency transactions and spend optimisation.
Once you’ve chosen a platform and set up your systems, you need to communicate your spending policies and guidelines. This is essential to help ensure compliance and maintain control over your company's finances.
Make standardised processes and policies available in an easy-to-access format like a document, internal web page or Notion page. This will make accessing and understanding your policies fast and simple across the team.
Educating your employees on the importance of effective spend management and the tools and processes involved is crucial for driving adoption and success.
This can include training on expense reporting, procurement procedures and the use of spend management software.
By analysing your spending data, you can identify trends, detect anomalies, and make informed decisions that align with your business objectives, which is crucial for continuous improvement.
This could involve examining spend by category, vendor or department, and using those insights to optimise your procurement processes, supply chain and budgeting.
Manually tracking spend across multiple channels, departments or business units is slow and costly.
Spend management best practices give you greater visibility into and control over your finances by standardising processes, establishing clear spending policies and guidelines and allowing you to make data-driven decisions.
If you’re using a platform like Juni, you can digitise all your data including incoming invoices and employee expenses so you have everything at your fingertips. No more manually chasing down invoices or uploading them to your system.
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Spend management is all about getting visibility into and control over company spend. For example, sourcing, budgeting, data management, supplier management, and cash flow management.
Spend analysis involves data collection, data cleansing, data analysis to uncover potential areas where you can streamline processes, improve efficiency, or achieve cost savings.
Juni is not a bank – yet. We’re a financial technology company providing e-money services and as such are not part of a deposit guarantee scheme. Learn more about our license and how we keep your business and money safe.
Juni Technology AB (company number 559248-0908) is licensed and registered as an electronic money institution with the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Sw. Finansinspektionen) (license no: 64025). Payment Card Solutions (UK) Limited (company number 05941947) and UAB B4B Payments Europe (company number 305539054) are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (ref: 930619) and the Bank of Lithuania (licence no: 76), respectively. The Juni Mastercard Corporate Card is issued by Payment Card Solutions (UK) Limited and UAB B4B Payments Europe pursuant to a license by Mastercard International Incorporated. Mastercard and the circles design are registered trademarks of Mastercard International Incorporated. Juni Technology AB. Masthamnsgatan 21, 413 28 Göteborg, Sweden. © 2025 Juni. All Rights Reserved.
