Spendesk: Why Spend Management Needs to be Active

Spend management is a crucial tool for procurement, allowing teams to optimise spend, reduce costs and maximise value for its suppliers.

By taking control of spend management, procurement teams can discover where their money is being spent and create an environment where it can efficiently flourish, transparency can be found and strategic procurement processes can be made, affecting the company’s profitability and competitiveness.

Julien Chriqui, Group Product Manager, Procurement for Spendesk, was CEO and Founder of Okko, an intake-to-procure solution for modern companies. When Spendesk acquired Okko in April 2024, his team became part of the wider Spendesk family and he took up his current role. 

His job is to lead the procurement product efforts at Spendesk as it builds the first European platform combining spend management and procurement for mid-market companies with up to 1,000 employees.

He described this as: “An incredibly exciting and rewarding project as we are creating something unique that will have a real impact for our customers.”

Spendesk connects all company spending, helping businesses in the EEA and UK save time and money by making the lives of the finance team less stressful and more productive. A France-founded company but with offices in Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid, Spendesk has an international team of talented people that enables it to meet the needs of companies in multiple markets.

Okko's procurement capabilities add a whole new dimension to Spendesk's already comprehensive feature set, which was built through a combination of its proprietary technology and strategic partnerships in payments that have been forged in its core markets. 

“As the first European solution to fully integrate procurement and spend management for mid-sized businesses, and are very proud of our work helping companies to improve efficiencies, control spending, and minimise risks,” he adds.

Julien sat down with Procurement Magazine to explain the importance of spend management, the impact of AI on the platform and what the future holds.

Why is spend management such a vital tool?

Having talked to hundreds of procurement and finance teams, it was clear that organisations required an integrated finance platform with procure-to-pay, contract and renewal management, expense management, and corporate cards all rolled into one solution. Having this in one place gives finance teams a holistic view of all purchasing activity within the business. 

This enables organisations to create a common purchasing and expense management process incorporating simple approval workflows for card purchases and expenses with more complex cross-functional approval workflows for purchase orders and invoices. The result is a guided, user-friendly experience for employees that ensures the finance team has complete visibility and the right level of control. 

Spend management also allows companies to automate controls, accounting, and payments for all purchasing activities – three areas that have traditionally been manual and time-consuming. This not only drives greater efficiency within the business, but frees up finance teams to focus on more strategic tasks. 

What separates good companies from great ones when it comes to their handling of spend management?

Great companies do three things:

• Have finance teams with an in-depth understanding of the needs of the wider business and set up simple but efficient rules to control and monitor spend. From this foundation, they can create a cost-efficient culture and enable collaboration between finance and all other departments at every level.  
• Set-up the right tools that allow them to easily create and implement rules; monitor all requests, approvals, commitments, payments and bookkeeping in a central place; and automate all recurring manual tasks such as matching purchase orders to invoices. 
• Set-up a cost-efficient culture and succeed in creating collaboration between finance and business at every level.

What is the best approach for spend management? Can you share some examples or success stories?

The best approach for spend management is to be active, not passive. The strategy, this involves consolidating payments and negotiating as a single entity, where finance teams can leverage their combined purchasing power to secure more favourable rates and terms from suppliers. Not only does this help in managing costs, but it also strengthens relationships with suppliers.

Adopting robust invoice management practices is vital; Spendesk research shows that of the estimated 550 billion invoices issued annually worldwide, only 10% are sent in paperless form. Paper invoices require manual handling and are even more tedious for finance teams to deal with than electronic invoices. 

In general, too many businesses still rely on manual processes to receive, validate, and log invoice data; automating these tasks can help them save time and reduce errors that can result in inconsistencies, lost money, and legal complications.

From a procurement perspective, the best approach for expenses and non-strategic purchases is to set up simple spend policies and approval workflows, and cost-centre budgets for some expense categories. When it comes to expensive purchases and strategic purchases, businesses must create procurement policies and workflows that systematise approval and purchase order tracking. 

One of our customers, a tech provider for human resource companies, currently covers 99% of its spending with these rules. Every purchase is done with anticipation and control, making it easy for the business to manage – and ensuring there are no surprises for the finance team to deal with. 

How is AI reshaping spend management?

There are a number of ways AI is changing spend management and procurement – such as extracting data from unstructured documents. For example; a customer could simply drag and drop a 30-page contract into our platform, and – using large language models – important data such as dates, pricing details, negotiated terms, and so on, would be extracted in seconds. A purchase order can then be created while storing the contract data for renewal monitoring. 

AI can also enable smart accounting, with every purchase order and invoice pre-filled. An AI procurement assistant can provide dynamic guidance on budgets and policies for staff making procurement requests. At the same time this technology can also power risk detection through scanning contracts and assessing legal, financial, and security risks against pre-set rules.  Vendor consolidation processes can also be driven by AI; flagging requests and contracts, while guiding requesters to pre-approved vendors.

How will spend management change in the next 12-18 months?

AI is currently driving much of the change in spend management. It enables greater automation, smarter recommendations, more assistance for employees making purchases; while giving finance teams and leaders better data intelligence to drive policy-making and forecasting. In addition it improves the user experience by seamlessly creating reports, custom dashboards and supporting natural language, including humanised queries. 

Another key trend in spend management will be CFO stack bundling. With the macro economic environment demanding every company utilise cost-effective tech solutions, there will be a growth in all-in-one platform strategies. Businesses will have just one tool that can handle procurement, spend management, expenses, invoices and the like, rather than using many individual tools. 

How will Spendesk continue to stay on the cutting edge of it?

Spendesk has consistently been at the forefront of innovation in the spend management space. We will work closely with our customers to understand their evolving requirements while ensuring our innovation agenda matches these needs. 

Through continual refinements to our toolset, we can support our customers as they grow by driving efficiencies within their organisation, giving them 100% visibility on all operational spend and reaching their wider business goals.

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