Everyone has a skeleton or two in their closets. Me, I have a whole pile. Skeletons of shopping trips past, things I had good intentions of returning. But thanks to my inability to hold on to those impossibly small pieces of paper called receipts, they now sit, covered in dust on the closet floor until it’s garage sale or donation time. All that wasted money; all that wasted opportunity because I simply am unable to keep track of my receipts.

Which brings me to expense management. Lost receipts are only one of the myriad of challenges that plague corporate expense management. Paper forms, manual processing, untimely submissions and cumbersome audits all contribute to an expense management process that is inefficient and costly.

According to Aberdeen’s 2010 report “The State of Travel & Expense Management”, it costs the average organization $28.91 to process a single expense report. If you are a 100-person organization and each individual submits an expense report once a quarter, you are looking at $11,564 just process the reports. Imagine how costly this becomes as you grow to thousands of employees submitting reports!

Now compare those costs with that of a “best-in-class” organization, where on average it only costs $6.25 to process an expense report. That’s $22.66 less per statement than the industry average – or for our 100-person organization a savings of $9,064 per year.

So what separates the industry average from best-in-class? How are best-in-class organizations able to operation so efficiently that it costs them only a quarter of what it costs others to manage their expense process? Join Coupa and Christopher Dwyer, supply management expert and author of Aberdeen’s 2010 “The State of Travel and Expense Management”, on Thursday, September 16th, at 11:00am Pacific / 2:00pm Eastern and find out.

Register today to discover the strategic importance of expense management, the growing evolution of cloud technology, and the steps you can take to improve existing expense management programs and derive value from this once back-office function. Step 1, don’t lose your receipts!

It used to be when people whispered about the “double dip” at cocktail parties, the main concern was avoiding eating something that was now germ laden because someone had thoughtlessly taken a bite of their chip, bread stick, vegetable, etc. and dipped it back into the community dish. Today the whispers are directed at a totally different kind of double dip, one that has greater implications beyond sharing germs and getting a cold.

As fears of a double dip recession grow and the likelihood of it actually happening increases, whispers have turned into conversations about how will companies respond to yet another downturn. Will there be more layoffs? Will spending thaw or stay frozen? And for procurement and finance professionals, the question becomes how do I protect company profits in these trying times? How can I continue to cut costs and deliver savings? After all, you just had to make cuts and reduce resources to stay afloat during the first recession.

There is no easy answer. Economists will tell you to spend, spend, spend; only by aggressively pumping money into the system will the economy return to prosperity. Financial advisors will tell you to spend prudently, hold onto as much cash as possible in order to outlast the storm. The truth is, you need to do a little bit of both – spend in strategic areas that will put you in a leadership position when this whole mess is over. And you need to do it in a measured, controlled way.

I’ve talked to several CPOs and CFOs over the last few weeks, and for the majority managing spend isn’t about slashing budgets or cutting costs and resources – those really are last resort options. Executives know spend is necessary to run a successful business, but that spend needs to be visible and it needs to be controlled. Executives need to know how funds are being distributed and have the mechanisms to take real-time action to reign in spend. Now is the time to put these systems, controls, and measures in place. Re-evaluate your process, find areas for improvement, take action and get everyone committed to smarter spending and saving.

So no matter if we end up in the depths of a double dip recession or finally see the recovery we have all been promised, you will be poised for success – and still have interesting conversation for those cocktail parties.

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Learn more about how CFOs and CPOs are leveraging Coupa to achieve greater spend visibility and control:

• Watch the video, or ;
• Attend our panel discussion at CFO Rising West in October

If you take down any picture in my apartment you will notice the same thing behind every one, there are at least 3 or 4 holes from failed attempts to line up the picture properly. There was no rhyme or reason to my hanging strategy at the time, no measurements taken. I just went for it until it was as good as it could get. But not having a plan will eventually cost me – probably a rather large portion of my deposit.

As with hanging pictures or building a bookshelf or any number of DIY projects, when making decisions about where to cut costs and reduce resources you must act with precision. One wrong cut could easily cause a negative impact throughout the business. Before you make the cut, you need to be double, triple check your calculations, understand the metrics and then take the appropriate action.

But what measures are most important when making these decisions? Which will define where you are successful and where you are struggling?

In Coupa’s recent webinar “Big Bang Benchmarking”, experts Mickey North Rizza, AMR Research analyst and supply chain expert, and Ravi Thakur, Coupa’s resident expert on transactional benchmarking and measurement, laid out 10 must measure metrics to identify what’s working and where you need to consider making cuts.

1. Requisition & PO Approval Cycle (Time): How efficient is your process? Are there areas that can be eliminated or streamlined to improve cycle times?
2. Orders & Invoices Processed per FTE (#): How efficient are your resources? Are they aligned with the volume of orders and invoices that need to be processed?
3. Purchasing Operating Costs (USD): How much does it cost for you to run your procurement process? Where can costs be further reduced?
4. Days Payable Outstanding (DPO): Are bills getting paid on time? Are there opportunities for further discounts?
5. Touchless Procurement: How many manual resources are necessary to manage the process? Where can manual intervention be addressed using automation?
6. Savings / spend: How much are you savings based on spend? Can you be saving more by eliminating unnecessary spend?
7. Quality – Rejection %: Are you only spending on the necessities? What projects can be cut or deferred?
8. Cost of Processing per Order & per Invoice (USD): How costly are your resources? Can you reduce the costs while maintaining productivity?
9. Spend Under Management: How much of your spend is actively managed? Are you missing opportunities to further cut costs by not seeing what you are spending?
10. Customer Satisfaction Ratings: Are customers happy with the goods and services they receive? Do resources need to be shuffled to address dissatisfaction areas?

So, maybe my grandpa was right when he said, “measure twice, cut once”. It really is the only way to ensure that you are making the right cuts before you do something that will cost you – like hammering a bunch of random holes into a wall.

To learn more about the 10 must measure metrics for success, watch Big Bang Benchmarking on demand at: http://go.coupa.com/big-bang-benchmarking-webinar