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Coupa Software: Pioneering the Best-in-Class Expense Management solution

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Rob Bernshteyn. CEO, Coupa SoftwareRob Bernshteyn, CEO For employees, gathering and organizing data, as well as submitting it to the accounts department for expense management can be one of those painful, frustrating processes-- it’s no secret that expense management can be laborious and time-consuming. The accounts department has to manually go through each claim amongst hoards of paper receipts, multiple excel sheets containing expense claims to verify the attached bills and receipts one by one in lengthy and tedious process, and pass the claims accordingly. In addition, all of this has to comply with the company’s expense policies and guidelines.

The use of traditional means of managing expenses may seem viable for smaller organizations. With only a handful of employees, validating and managing expense may not come across as a difficult task. However, this traditional means of expense management often leave employees spending hours of their productive time, losing focus on their core objectives and could prove detrimental to the health of a business—especially when businesses are experiencing significant growth. Hence, it becomes crucial for companies to adopt a new-age system that helps achieve a seamless expense management experience for employees and finance teams.

"Today’s CFO must be able to focus on combating strategic and operational risks to add the most value to their organization"

Old is gold, but the same does not hold true at all times— keeping up with the industry trends is crucial for growth and scale for any business. This is where Coupa Software, a leading provider of business expense management solutions steps in. The company offers a comprehensive, disruptive and innovative cloud-based spend management (CSM) solution that helps companies control and gain visibility into their indirect spending while generating savings that go directly to the bottom line. The platform provides greater visibility into and control over how companies spend money. By doing so, businesses are able to achieve real, measurable value and savings that drive their profitability. The firm combined e-procurement, expense management, and e-invoicing capabilities in the spend management industry’s only unified cloud platform. Furthermore, the solution is easy to use, fast to configure and deploy, and is cost-effective. “Coupa Expenses is a market-leading expense management solution that solves this problem with a relentless drive to ensure customer success and quantifiable results,” explains Rob Bernshteyn, CEO at Coupa Software.

Re-defining the Role of Today’s CFOs

Today, the role of the chief financial officers (CFOs) is shifting dramatically towards strategic decision-making and combating business risks. A recent study of 500 CFOs and senior finance leaders conducted by Wall Street Journal Custom Content and Dow Jones Intelligence in partnership with Coupa, revealed an in-depth insight into the evolving role of the CFO, the challenges he/she faces, and the factors that make leaders not only survive but thrive with risk.

In addition to 500 quantitative insights from CFOs worldwide, five qualitative interviews were conducted with finance executives from five major global organizations. The report revealed that 60 percent of the CFOs stated that their role has expanded to have more extensive participation in strategic business decisions and are hindered by functional tasks such as developing budgets and managing financial reporting, audit, and compliance.

Coupa allows companies to gain full visibility and control over all expenses by providing complete visibility over a company’s expenditure.


The report also suggested a new risk framework from Coupa that CFOs can use to score their organizations across a set of twelve risk factors. As the CFO respondents cited fraud risk 53 percent, business environment risk 46 percent, and operational risk 44 percent as their top concerns and priorities for improvement. Yet the relative importance that respondents attach to these top categories does not appear to reflect their current state of organizational readiness. “Today’s CFO must be able to focus on combating strategic and operational risks to add the most value to their organization and their shareholders,” elucidates Todd Ford, chief financial officer at Coupa.

Automating Expense Management and Fraud Detection

Coupa is transforming the entire process of expense management by providing new and unique capabilities through its platform to empower its customers, partners, and suppliers with increased visibility, actionable insights, and solutions to manage their finances. In addition, the company is helping enterprises align with the constantly changing global compliance, and provide a delightful user experience to help ensure expense report accuracy, reduce spend leakages, and pay employees on time.

Coupa Expenses is recognized by analysts for its rapid, industry-leading innovations in Travel & Expense Management. The company’s expense management software provides best-in-class user experience and is designed to eliminate manual work with a cloud-based, user-centric experience for the fulfillment of the modern enterprise needs. Coupa Expenses uniquely automates an organization’s expense reporting culture and routes the financial reports to an accounting review based on report score or pre-defined conditions such as spending over company policy or expense report amount. This enables finance to leverage resources more efficiently. Additionally, Coupa’s expense management app uniquely offers features such as voice recognition, smartertrip mileage tracking, to automate mileage tracking and expense capture, and over 300 travel integrations to leading airlines, hotels, rideshare services, and more to help employees save valuable time, resources and increase efficiency.

Another constituent of the platform Spend Guard, powered by Coupa Community Intelligence, leverages the latest artificial intelligence (A.I) and machine-learning techniques to detect errors and fraud automatically across all business spend to manage risk efficiently and effectively. Rather than relying on selective or random audit, the A.I detects fraud across every transaction scale and displays it on the dashboards in real-time for risk analysis and visibility across departments, categories, and individual users. This allows users to audit activity in their transactional system by leveraging the latest artificial intelligence insights for fraud detection before the transaction even occurs to prevent spend leakage. In addition, Spend Guard provides the ability to add additional approvers to transactions to flag suspicious transactions and ensures expenses are reviewed by the right people, in real-time to prevent fraud without an increase in AP cycles.

Empowering Users with Complete Visibility and Control

Coupa allows companies to gain full visibility and control over all expenses by providing complete visibility over a company’s expenditure by enabling employees to view pre-approved and post-approved spend on the same platform. This helps customers to reduce spend leakage and generate significant savings across all expensed, invoiced, and PO-backed spend. With Coupa’s Community Intelligence, companies can gain performance insights into their travel and expense program across several success metrics, peer benchmarks, and obtain, targeted recommendations to drive performance improvements and significant results. Coupa breaks the traditional silo systems and stops customers to spend on recurring, negotiate underlying contracts by placing targeted controls. Furthermore, the platform also offers intuitive admin capabilities, advanced accounting review, VAT and per diem support, detailed reports, support for more than 20 languages and 150 currencies, policy reminders to users, a native mobile app, receipt photo capture and OCR, credit card integrations, and more.

Driving Innovation in the field

Coupa, with its in-depth domain knowledge in e-procurement, e-invoicing, and expense management— the company is providing a best-in-class cloud computing platform, a fast-growing community of customers. Coupa is credited for pioneering industry-first innovations like real-time benchmarking, intelligent expense report auditing and has numerous patents to their name. The company also has announced that it is currently working on new features that will deliver on Coupa’s vision of creating a comprehensive cloud platform for businesses to spend smarter, simpler, and remain secure at every transactional step of their BSM strategy. Coupa is leading the way in helping companies spend smarter and save more—the company was recently named a ‘leader in the Gartner 2019 Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay Suites’ for the fourth consecutive time. “We believe being named a Leader by Gartner for the fourth consecutive time is a clear recognition that our vision and commitment to delivering a comprehensive Business Spend Management platform with prescriptive insights enables businesses to spend smarter,” states Bernshteyn.

- Sarah Dawson
    November 13, 2019
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Top 10 Business Expense Management Solutions Companies - 2019

Coupa Software

Company
Coupa Software

Management
Rob Bernshteyn, CEO and Todd Ford, CFO

Description
Coupa Software is a provider of disruptive and innovative cloud spends management (CSM) solutions that help companies control and gain visibility into their indirect spending while generating savings that go directly to the bottom line. The company combines e-procurement, expense management, and e-invoicing capabilities in the spend management industry's only unified cloud platform. The platform is innovative, easy to use, fast to configure and deploy, and cost-effective. Coupa is leading the way in helping companies spend smarter and save more with in-depth domain knowledge in e-procurement, e-invoicing, and expense management