After a series of substantive discussions with top procurement and finance leaders that use Coupa for business spend management (BSM), it’s clear that today’s decision-makers are doing their best to stay ahead of trends impacting not just their respective functions but their businesses at large. As such, they’re experimenting with additional ways to leverage Coupa functionality for greater use cases in their day-to-day that can add more value at a lower cost. 

Though high-growth or emerging-growth organizations may have originally deployed point solutions to perform narrow tasks, it’s now evident that they’re migrating and consolidating those systems into Coupa for the majority of their BSM functional processes, creating a robust, all-in-one platform environment that saves money, reduces redundancies, and minimizes risk. This is the fastest path to BSM maturity. 

That path typically starts with common Coupa applications like Procurement, Invoicing, and Payments then matures into Sourcing, Analytics, Travel & Expense, Third-Party Risk Management, and Contract Lifecycle Management before implementing Cash Management and Treasury solutions. When assessed in totality, the entire Source-to-Settle process is transformed and modernized into a high-powered, high-performance framework. 

With this in mind, explore below the prominent trends Coupa users are facing in 2023 and how leading organizations are seeing around the change curve: 

2023 Procurement Trends 

  1. Increased expectations for spend analytics and reporting to identify cost reduction opportunities: Procurement is moving from negotiator to strategic partner, with expectations to provide analytics on spend data and opportunities to deliver savings.  
  2. Supplier consolidation and savings targets in key categories: Rationalize technology systems spend and avoid vendor bloat with multiple vendors that provide the same service or support the same functional process.
  3. Increased accountability structure for budget owners: Organizations are holding budget owners accountable for spending within targets. BSM applications like Coupa natively provide the ability to curb maverick spend, enforce compliance, and implement continuous cost control measures like zero-based budgeting.
  4. Changes to taxonomy structure/Coupa commodities for more granular reporting: Instead of bucket categories for SaaS/Software, analytics are expected in greater detail, such as hosting and server fees for on-premises and cloud, maintenance, and warranty as well as software usage details such as human resources information system (HRIS), cloud infrastructure, and cloud security. Together, granular reporting can aid in system consolidation efforts.    

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2023 Payments Trends  

  1. Diversification of banking relationships creates added need for treasury cash solutions and easy bank integrations: Organizations are adding multiple banks, increasing the need for cash management solutions to provide a consolidated picture of balances at different institutions.   
  2. Growing adoption and acceptance of virtual cards: Suppliers are becoming more comfortable accepting virtual cards, which can help turn procurement functions into revenue generators.
  3. Growing focus on tax compliance and local regulation: Leading BSM applications like Coupa integrate natively with third-party tax engines to ensure compliance with local regulations. 
  4. Cash flow: Maximize value from payment terms through early-pay discounts and extensions. 

2023 New Vendor Onboarding Trends 

  1. Focus on data integrity: Modern vendor onboarding platforms increase automation and reduce data entry. Coupa users are integrating with third parties and external data sources to validate supplier-entered banking information, improving data integrity and catching attempts for fraud before supplier records are approved.  
  2. Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) tracking and supplier scorecards: Leading BSM organizations have standards around ESG and third-party spend, which Coupa can support tracking and reporting on progress against these metrics.
  3. Ongoing assessment of key criteria: Risk metrics, Certificates of Insurance (COI), third-party risk, and the expiration of vendor documents can be automated in Coupa, providing efficient and actionable alerts.
  4. Growing focus on duplicate data records: Coupa has native functionality to provide duplicate checks on vendors to prevent one business entity from being set up as two separate records, improving the ability to provide accurate spend and risk reporting. Coupa Pay also resolves the challenge of setting up one business entity as separate records due to separate remittance locations.  

Coupa users have a distinct advantage from non-Coupa users due to the tool’s intuitive ability to consolidate multiple functional processes within one cohesive platform. For example, spend data originating from Coupa can be used to deliver savings opportunities elsewhere in the organization and in the Coupa ecosystem. This capability expands the role of Coupa and empowers procurement and finance leaders to be strategic partners to the business’s larger corporate objectives and future vision. 

For expert support implementing or optimizing Coupa, contact Biovell .