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The Pandemic Forced Companies to Rethink How They Track Their Cash
The death of monthly accounting has long been overdue
Remote work has been steadily on the rise for more than a decade, but when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, forcing many businesses to go remote all at once, it significantly accelerated the pace of digital transformation across companies and industries. The use of collaboration software like Slack and videoconferencing platforms, including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet, skyrocketed. A study from Marketing Week and Econsultancy found that one in five large enterprises increased their investment in digital work tools in April. And while in most respects, tech-enabled businesses were already well equipped to go fully virtual, one department in particular rose to the occasion: finance.
For many companies, finance and accounting departments have traditionally been slow to fully embrace automation and digital solutions. As a result of being reliant on manual work and reactive workflow processes, accountants, controllers, and CFOs at otherwise tech-driven companies were ill prepared to track cash flow across a remote workforce — let alone during an unfolding economic crisis, when controlling costs is paramount not only to staying competitive but also staying in business.
However, the pandemic has sparked a long overdue shift in how finance teams manage business spend, marked most notably by the death of monthly accounting practices. The companies that are casting aside their old way of thinking and stepping into a more proactive and real-time spending paradigm are now at an advantage and are leading the way for others to follow suit.
The rise of ‘distributed spend’ as a business category
Looking back at our pre-Covid-19 days, it’s important to remember that the explosion of SaaS and e-commerce in tandem with the rise of gig, contract, and remote work created a fundamental shift in the way companies spend money. Over the past 15 years, businesses have been spending more, and in more diverse ways, than ever before — particularly online: Forrester predicts B2B e-commerce will hit $1.8 trillion by 2023 in the United States alone. Further, software spending is climbing: It doubled from $60…
