Small and medium businesses are being encouraged to spend on automation and innovation if they want to score a win from the government’s recently announced budget.

Lack of innovation causing growth hurdles

While the budget has delivered some small-term gains for business owners, Fabian Calle, managing director, small to medium business, SAP Concur Australia and New Zealand, said other issues are holding small businesses back from success.

“There is a major sticking point for SMBs in Australia and New Zealand because they still heavily rely on legacy, manual business processes, which will continue to hold them back even after an economic recovery.

“Recently announced Australian federal budget small business incentives such as JobKeeper, JobMaker and instant asset write-off, and the New Zealand small business eCommerce package, are giving SMBs the opportunity now to restructure their organisations by replacing high-risk, costly, manual systems with automated processes that will give them the agility and scalability they need for the longer term.”

Manual processes costing businesses time and money

According to SAP Concur, small businesses that continue to use manual expense and invoicing processes are spending more than five hours each week of each finance employee’s time on processing invoices.

Simultaneously businesses are being encouraged to align their invoice process with the larger goals of reducing expenses, increasing efficiency and getting better visibility into spend across the business.

Achieving these goals requires the elimination of labour-intensive manual processes. Manual processes also make it difficult to monitor spending trends and behaviours, and detect potential mistakes or fraud, which ultimately leads to cash flow problems for SMBs.

“SMBs can use significant time and cost savings that can be achieved through automation to reinvest in the business, and drive new opportunities that will deliver resilience, scalability and sustainable growth so they can weather the storm of the next economic downturn,” Calle said.

“It is crucial to choose an automated system that ensures financial visibility, avoids risk, and drives operational efficiencies. The solution must be secure and highly available to employees through smart devices to meet the needs of the new anytime, anywhere workforce.”

SAP Concur has released a free Accounts Payable Automation: A Buyer’s Guide and Expense Automation Solutions Guide to help small businesses that are considering automation software.