What is Cloud Spend Management?

Cloud Spend Management (CSM) is a new category of enterprise spend management software, delivered to organizations via the Internet cloud. It combines the best e-procurement and expense management technologies into a single platform and solution that is easy to use, fast to configure and deploy, and very cost-effective. Coupa CSM consolidates e-procurement and expense management into a single solution for managing, and more effectively controlling, all non-payroll indirect spending, offering the CFO instant visibility to organizational spending as it occurs. The platform features a single user interface, a single workflow model for approving purchases and reimbursable expenses, a consistent chart of accounts, and one set of budget entries against which to credit purchases and expenses.

Why Invest in Cloud Spend Management

Cloud spend management solutions have proven to be suitable for enterprises of every scale because they offer significant advantages over their legacy and hosted counterparts:

• Facebook-/Amazon-like usability. A conscious focus on simplifying the end-user experience to naturally encourage participation in cost-savings programs at all levels in the organization.
• Fast adoption. New tools make it possible for companies to achieve 100% user adoption within months.
• Savings from more spend under management. Rapid implementation and broad adoption greatly increases a company’s time to value with new cloud-based solutions. The new standard is for a company to get 85% of its total spend under management within 12 months and achieve an additional 18-20% savings by driving that spend through preferred suppliers.
• Instant visibility. Executives and managers are able to see the budgetary impact of proposed spending prior to approving the requisition, giving greater control and prevents overspending.
• Lower burden on IT. Cloud applications are end-user “configurable,” a big improvement over hosted and on-premise alternatives that are “customizable” by IT developers at great expense. This configurability promotes self-service for business users and supports distributed operations.
• Transparent pricing. Cloud applications typically have an “all-in cost model / pay for what you use” business model that eliminates capital outlay as well as traditional professional services fees and IT maintenance costs.

The Four Pillars of Cloud Spend Management

Coupa’s multi-tenant cloud architecture connects the four pillars of Coupa Cloud Spend Management into a single solution for smarter spending that is highly differentiated from Ariba, Concur and others. The four core components include:

• Executive Dashboards and Alerts that provide real-time visibility and actionable intelligence to more effectively control company spending (and prevent over-spending).
• Smarter E-Procurement that simplifies the procure-to-pay process, and empowers all employees to participate in, and contribute to, company cost-savings initiatives
• Smarter Expense Management with innovations to encourage the “right” employee behavior and score audit reports for prioritized auditing by the accounting department.
• Real-Time Benchmarking that informs companies how to optimize and improve their spend management practices based on true transactional comparisons of their performance against the Coupa community for dozens of operational key performance indicators

Additional Resources