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Government contractors need to achieve and maintain DCAA compliance. However, some may have multiple outdated, legacy financial systems that make it stressful to stay on top of all of the spending across their ever-changing and growing organizations.

This can make it difficult to:

• See how money is being spent and by whom.
• Review and control employee spend before it happens.
• Enforce and improve compliance with spend policies.
• Spot data patterns that may be hidden across channels or systems.
• Actively identify and mitigate fraud, waste, and abuse.
  

The Answer? Modernize and Automate

To overcome these issues, organizations need to modernize and standardize systems to automate spend control and improve compliance.

This enables organizations to:

• Capture digital records and improve the accuracy of expense reports.
• Insert controls at the point of purchase to prevent non-compliant spend.
• Gain visibility into future travel and spend with spend requests and approvals.
• Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically review expense and receipt data.

More importantly, it provides more clarity and certainty to make better and more informed decisions about spend.

Then¡­Audit Spend

When spend happens, government contracting organizations must also have the right tools, procedures, and processes in place to audit employee spend and expense reports¡ªto in turn prepare for DCAA audits. Because doing audits manually can be time-consuming, stressful, and expensive, organizations should look for a technology solution that can simultaneously automate the audit process and improve efficiency and compliance.

Best Practices for Inserting Spend Controls to Achieve Compliance

As your organization levels up its spend management systems, be sure to apply best practices for spend control to ensure compliance, such as:

• Create straightforward travel and expense spend policies. Make sure these encourage spending that supports organizational goals.
• Provide ongoing training on your organization¡¯s travel and expense policies and tools. This will enable your employees to make more policy-compliant spend choices.
• Require pre-spend authorization before spend occurs. Have managers review spending for airfare, hotels, car rentals, etc., in advance to prevent non-compliant activity.
• Use an online booking tool with built-in policy by traveler. Restrict different types of travelers¡¯ ability to select out-of-policy options to increase compliance and modify behavior.
• Use an expense reporting system with built-in policies and user guidance. Insert spending thresholds, flags, and other automatic notifications to help guide users when filling out expense reports. This can help prevent and identify non-compliant behaviors (e.g., lack of documentation, overspending, unauthorized use of expense types, etc.).
• Use mobile receipt capture and point-to-point GPS mileage tracking. Not only will this eliminate the need to scan or attach paper receipts to expense reports and ensure accurate mileage reporting, but it also increases the accuracy of data entry.
• Regularly conduct audits to ensure compliance with your policies. This will help you identify any areas where training may be needed.
• Implement robust reporting to analyze spend and make improvements.

Now is a great time to update your organization¡¯s systems and automate spend management. Not only can a great spend management solution help your organization gain more visibility into employee spend, but it will increase compliance with your organization¡¯s spend policies as well as DCAA compliance. ?

Want to learn more about how to level up your aerospace, defense, and government contracting organization¡¯s spend management?

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