Changing trends of business spend in the new normal: see what your data speak to you

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Around the globe, a tiny virus has bought challenges unlike any seen in recent history. Until a vaccine or a cure is found, the corporates have opted to work from home and other precautionary policies in order to safeguard their employees.

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Whilst remote working does have many benefits, corporates believe this to be one of the cost-saving measures. On the contrary, Tata Sons chairman, N Chandrasekaran pointed out that “work from home not cost-effective”.

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Our new initiative CXO Diaries, give us a chance to talk to industry leaders every fortnight where they touch upon current economic trends. The second edition where we discussed the “CFO’s and the changing landscape of expense management” gave us a very different perception of the current spend trends.

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Mr. Prakash Jain who’s a senior finance controller for Brillio mentioned in the session that “If I look at my employee reimbursement expenditure, there is a change in the mix in which the employees are claiming the expenses. Previously, they used to claim expenses like the ‘refreshment’ but now they are claiming expenses like Broadband reimbursement, etc. So the expenses are happening but the buckets have changed.”

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We see that many of the companies are observing the same trend. To validate this hypothesis, We took an opportunity to go back to our clients and check if they are noticing any anomalies in their spends. In our recent webinar “Reinvent your spend data” we tried to uncover these findings.

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Hosted by Gitanjali Kapur, Head – Account Management, Happay, and Rahul Kashyap, Head- Analytics, Happay, this session gave us some staggering insights. 88% of the audience agreed when asked if they see any change in the nature of the spends in their organizations.

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The data resonated with the audience. Rahul disclosed a few interesting insights which he found in his analysis of spend data for top 500 companies in our client base.

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The changing spend buckets in the New Normal

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• Companies are spending more to make employees comfortable working from home by reimbursing the setup cost. “Communication expense” is one of the new categories which popped up in recent times and ‘headset’ being the most often reimbursed commodity.
• Employees’ mental well-being and health subscriptions for a major focus for corporates. Health check-ups are a very common spend category in recent times and “Health Checkup” being the most common reimbursed expense.

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Rahul added “ These trends vary organization to organizations and are also industry dependent.  But we have noticed that the volume of transactions is still the same. The categories like hotel booking, refreshments which occupied a major chunk till a few months back are replaced by new categories which never existed before.”

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Analytics on organizational expenses can help make business decisions more efficiently. With Happay’s “Spend Insight” module you can keep a track of the expenses in your organization. Happay Spend Insights will enable you to see actionable insights with 5 intelligent modules:

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• Spend Analysis
• Policy Creator
• Compliance Monitoring
• Saving Analyser
• Efficiency Meter

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Check out our webinar below to learn more in detail.

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