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.

The Benefits of Cloud Computing

Coupa Cloud Spend Management is a native cloud application developed from a single code line and built atop a multi-tenant architecture that offers significant benefits over premise-based and hosted “on-demand” solutions – including rapid innovations that results in free and valuable upgrade releases at least 3-4 times per year. Because it is a true multi-tenant solution, Coupa Cloud Spend Management can aggregate data from across the platform to produce true performance benchmarks and real cross-company insights that help customers fine tune their spend management practices.

Companies that invest in Coupa Cloud Spend Management to more effective manage and control their non-payroll spending will be able to move after-the-fact expense reimbursement approvals into pre-approved purchases, and leverage the power of the community to help the company spend smarter via crowd sourcing, vendor reviews, and better business insights (such as late deliveries, requisition to approval cycle times).

Cloud Spend Management represents the future of how companies will employ the latest technologies to better manage their non-payroll spending.

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