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It's no secret, that working to become more sustainable is great for business.
Going green can help to ensure regulatory compliance, increase staff satisfaction and productivity, and boost profitability.
Check out our article on the benefits of greener business for more info.
To reap the benefits of going green, you need to embed sustainability throughout all your processes including spend management. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to thanks to an explosion in sustainable spend management tools.
But what are they and where do you start? Read on to learn how sustainable spend management tools can revolutionise your business
What are they?
Spend management tools allow you to collect, maintain, and evaluate spend data, so businesses can reduce costs, improve efficiency, establish networks of trusted suppliers, and ensure compliance.
In contrast, sustainable spend management tools go beyond mere finance. They help businesses to look at the bigger picture and take steps to reduce their carbon footprint and waste, while keeping pace with environmental regulations.
Combining sustainability and spend management is a great way to start your eco-friendly business journey, as most company emissions are from procuring goods and services, commuting, and business travel.
What they can do for you
Achieve targets with greener procurement
Sustainable procurement boosts efficiency, to help you to reduce long term costs. It also helps you to achieve your eco-friendly goals, so it’s easier to access finance, with many Investors seeing sustainability as a proxy for management effectiveness and the chance of long-term business success.
Tools like Ignite Procurement do more than save you money by simplifying the strategic sourcing process and helping you to manage contracts and suppliers. They make it easy to assess the sustainability of supplier products and operations. You can then use supplier data for contract negotiations and sustainability reporting. Ecovadis is another great tool that creates standardised sustainability ratings for companies all over the world, so you can pick greener suppliers.
Offset business travel emissions at no extra cost
Offsetting unavoidable emissions with sustainable spend management tools is another option.
The COCO+ travel platform allows you to offset your business travel emissions and then some, at no extra cost. With COCO+, users can sort travel options by their carbon footprint and find sustainable travel options that align with their company’s travel policy. They can then book trains, flights, car hires, airport parking and transfers, and hotels, safe in the knowledge that their travel is carbon negative.
COCO+ also offers a fuel card, that offsets more than the carbon impact of every litre you buy, making carbon negative fleet management a reality.
Track expense emissions and boost engagement
To maximise your impact and get the most out of going green, you need to engage your workers. Getting your workers involved can also increase satisfaction with almost half of staff, stating that working for an organisation with similar values contributes the most to feelings of belonging.
One nifty sustainable spend management tool to boost engagement is accountabl. It allows workers to see their environmental impact by tracking the carbon footprint of purchases in real-time. When an employee uses their card, logs a non-card expense, or records a journey in the app, they can see their carbon impact in the system. It also tracks spend data, mileage, and fuel reimbursements for complete visibility, helping to you to avoid nasty surprises, and protect your bottom-line.
Tracking the impact of expenses is an easy way to encourage greener choices and increase engagement. Because carbon footprints are mapped at the individual, group, and company level it also makes it simpler to find ways to reduce emissions.
Next steps
There’s a growing number of tools to make your spending more sustainable, covering every part of the spend management process. Many of these tools combine efficiency and cost-saving features, with sustainability, so it’s more affordable to start your eco-journey than ever before.
To help you get started, we’ve created a free downloadable guide on sustainable spend management.
Even better, you can try accountabl for free for 30 days.
