In today’s modern business landscape, many companies have multiple locations and remote employees. This makes any paper-based or on-premise process difficult to manage and properly execute, which can cause inefficiencies in nearly every department. In the area of expense management, errors such as misphrased documents and lost invoices are more likely to occur with paper-based processes. For this reason, many organizations have recognized the need to shift their spend-management operations to the cloud.

Spend-management software provides companies the ability to optimize and control money spent through a simple procure-to-pay process. By using a cloud-based spend management solution, companies can eliminate the need for paper-based processes entirely, and gain better control and insight into their expenses.

Utilizing a procure-to-pay process and running it at maximum operational efficiency should be a top priority for organizations. Here are three ways in which this shift can be beneficial to your company.

Provides detailed reporting and analytics. A cloud-based solution can help any business manage spending habits and improve visibility into its needs, budgets and costs, which ultimately allows for smarter spending. Many cloud solutions provide valuable insights and detailed analytics, with reporting functions to help identify spending trends as data. These solutions also allow for augmented forecasting. With improved spend forecasting, spend management becomes more effective, and better bottom-line savings can be achieved.

Offers greater visibility into budgets. Cloud-based platforms can provide better visibility into an organization's numerous budgets. Outdated and manual processes most likely don’t offer a comprehensive view of the budgetary impact a large acquisition might have on the budget as a whole. This can cause a multitude of problems, because the budget-variance report cannot be generated until a few weeks after month’s end. By the time the report is generated, it might be too late to intervene.

Building a budget takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. If it can’t be accessed with full visibility throughout the trail of spend, mistakes that waste valuable time and resources are likely to occur.

Improves efficiency and productivity. A recent study from Harvard Business Review showed that over 85 percent of organizations that have implemented cloud solutions have seen new means of growth and innovation, lowered costs, and increased business speed. This is due in part to the fact that moving to the cloud can help company stakeholders get a better view of what’s going on with their expenditures and budgets.

A cloud-based solution allows stakeholders and employees to access the system no matter where they’re located. This can help defuse a situation quickly when immediate intervention is needed, without wasting time or money on mistakes.

Effective spend management is important to a company’s success. A cloud-based spend-management solution can provide numerous benefits to an organization, no matter what industry they’re in. Organizations that have implemented such a solution have seen improved visibility into their budgets, highly effective reporting analytics, and increased productivity. It’s time to make the leap into the future of cloud-based spend management and leave manual, paper-based processes behind.

Stanton Jandrell is CEO of Fraxion.