Today, we welcome this guest post by Gabby Oglesby, Tradeshift Go Marketing Manager
Earlier this month, Dreamforce 2016 took over San Francisco and brought together over 175,000 influential leaders in business. At Dreamforce, we saw a ton of innovation in the marketing and sales categories, but not so much in the finance world. Here are our key takeaways from this year’s event, including the biggest trends to pay attention to going forward.
1. There was no real innovation for Finance
We had the pleasure of sitting in on a couple of FinancialForce sessions, which were designed to help businesses run their finances more efficiently. While other business areas like marketing and sales are integrating disruptive technologies such as AI, in finance and accounting, the tech stacks remain obsolete.
Thankfully, if you look around there are pockets of useful fintech innovation. For instance, solutions that streamline expense management processes, like Tradeshift Go, manage to ease the huge burden that’s on finance teams to keep accurate, consistent records and process huge amounts of data.
2. Spreadsheets remain the financial tool of choice
Automation may be a growing trend in marketing and CRM software, but finance still clings to the humble spreadsheet for tedious tasks. In fact, 60% of finance teams claim they’re “drowning in spreadsheets.”. Tradeshift Go may be the much-needed rescue boat for finance.
Tradeshift Go is the answer to finally streamlining the processes that were formerly tracked manually in a spreadsheet, including subscription management and credit card reconciliation.
Additionally, Go helps reduce unnecessary paperwork, processing costs, and expense reports. Say goodbye to tedium.
3. Finance teams want to be more strategic but are stuck in tactical manual processes
It’s time for CEOs to understand how innovative ideas can transform the financial landscape and help businesses and customers alike.
Finance teams are under greater pressure to automate processes, reduce fraud and human error, increase credibility, and have more visibility and control over company spend. This is how finance can help grow their company.
According to a CFO Alliance study, 66% of CFOs hope to spend more time engaged in strategic activities and break free from slow manual processes.
What you can do
Using new technology like Go, finance teams can finally get visibility into what employees need and how they spend, and get approvals and control over spend without having to go through mountains of spreadsheets and do manual reconciliations.
At the center of Go is its ability to issue virtual credit cards. Virtual cards can reinvent financial operations and improve the quality of spend reporting. In addition, you can use them to reduce fraud and eliminate manual reconciliations for good.
Moreover, the time you once wasted with approvals and reconciliation processes, you and your team can use for financial strategic analysis.
For more information on why Go is the best way to manage company spend, click here to request a demo.