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City and county finance teams are required to comply with various government laws and regulations. However, many state and local government organizations have multiple outdated, on-premises legacy finance systems that contain employee spend data. Before this data can be used by an organization, it must first be manually combined in a spreadsheet.

This can make it difficult for your city or county to:

• See how your money is being spent and by whom.
• Review and control employee spend before it happens.
• Enforce and improve compliance with spend policies.
• Spot data patterns that may be hidden across channels or systems.
• Actively identify and mitigate spend fraud, abuse, and waste.
  

The Answer? Modernize and Automate

To overcome these issues, state and local government organizations need to modernize their systems so they can automate spend control and improve compliance.

When your organization does, you will be able to:

• Capture digital records and improve the accuracy of expense reports.
• Insert controls at the point of purchase to reduce fraud and manage non-compliance.
• Gain visibility into future travel and spend with spend requests and approvals.
• Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically review expense and receipt data.
• More importantly, it will provide your organization with more clarity and certainty so you can make better and more informed decisions about spend.

Then¡­Audit Spend

When spending happens, city and county back-office teams must also have the right tools, procedures, and processes in place to audit employee spend and expense reports. Because doing an audit manually can be time-consuming and expensive, state and local government organizations should look for a technology solution that can simultaneously automate the audit process and improve efficiency and compliance.

Best Practices for Inserting Spend Controls to Achieve Compliance

As your city or county back-office team levels up its spend management systems, be sure to apply best practices for spend control to ensure compliance, such as:

• Create straight forward travel and expense spend policies. Make sure these policies encourage spending that supports your city¡¯s or county¡¯s goals.
• Provide ongoing training on your organization¡¯s travel and expense policies and tools. This will enable your employees to make more policy-compliant spend choices.
• Require pre-spend authorization before spending occurs. Have managers review spending for airfare, hotels, car rentals, etc., in advance to prevent non-compliant activity.
• Use an online booking tool with built-in policy by traveler. Restrict different types of travelers¡¯ ability to select out-of-policy options to increase compliance and modify behavior.
• Use an expense reporting system with built-in policies and user guidance. Insert spending thresholds, flags, and other automatic notifications to help guide users when filling out expense reports. This can help prevent and identify non-compliant behaviors (e.g., lack of documentation, overspending, unauthorized use of expense types, etc.).
• Use mobile receipt capture and point-to-point GPS mileage tracking. Not only will this eliminate the need to scan or attach paper receipts to an expense report and ensure accurate mileage reporting, but it also increases the accuracy of data entry.
• Regularly conduct audits to ensure compliance with your policies. This will help you identify any areas where training may be needed.
• Implement robust reporting to analyze spend and make improvements.

Now is a great time to update your state, city, and county government systems and automate spend management. Not only can a great spend management solution help your back-office teams insert important spend controls and gain more visibility into employee spend, but it will also increase compliance with your state or local government¡¯s spend policies. ?

Want to learn more about how to level up your state, city, or county spend management? Use these resources to help your organization get started today:

Download this one-pager to learn about some of the biggest challenges organizations face with controls and compliance, and tips to address them.

Download this eBook for 4 ways to measure your audit efficiency using your SAP ÂÜÀòÊÓƵ solutions.