Go on a spending diet

Has your spending left you feeling bloated and over weight? Has your uncontrolled spending given you the January blues? Do you know where those few extra pounds (or dollars) went? Did you feel the same way 12 months ago but lacked the resolve to truly tackle your complex expenditure? Here's a step by step plan to help your organisation feel slimmer and trimmer.

1. Define your goals

   Why not make your New Years resolution a decision to fix the problem of complex expenditure? Make it a SMART goal for 2015. That is, make it a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. Get your team together and agree a strategy and define what success will look like to you? Decide how you will measure success and propose a savings target. Now that you have defined your goals you can set up a system to help you achieve them.

2. Set up a system to help you achieve your goals

   A goal without a system is unlikely to suceed. A system is how your achieve a goal. It's the actions you take on a regular basis to make sure you achieve your goal in the long term. If you are going on a New Year diet then your system will be the diet you choose, whether to count calories, cut back on carbohydrates or take up a form of exercise, like my friend, for instance, enjoys Orlando Tennis Lessons. You will choose a system that suits your unique cirumstances, one you think is realistic for you. You may set daily or weekly limits on what you eat, or give yourself weight loss targets. You may find that there are aids that can help you with your weight loss such as an app designed to help you record what you eat and monitor your success. A goal without a system will probably fail, but a good system without a goal will probably succeed. If you put yourself on a diet and follow it without thinking about your goal of loosing weight will you loose weight? Probably, yes! But back to your goal of cutting your spending. The same principles apply to tackling overspending. If you implement the right system and follow it you will achieve your goal! Having set up your goals in step one you know what you want to achieve, to reach your goal you need to implement the right system to ensure success. This could be a simple manual system, a spreadsheet that tracks and records what you are spending and how you are spending it. But there is also software that you can implement to cut out the pain of developing your own system. Enterprise spend management platforms like Claritum give you real time visibility and control of your expenditure locally, nationally or globally.

3. Monitor and review your results

   If you were on a diet you might choose to measure your success in terms of how much weight you have lost, a reduction in your clothes size or how much better you are feeling. Being able to measure your success and monitor your results on a weekly or monthly basis allows you to to see how successful you are being and allows you to make adjustments to your goal as results are achieved.

If you don't measure your results you won't know if your system is working. If you find the system you implemented isn't working then measurement will help you determine why. Make sure the system you have in place allows you to track your spending and allows you to access information for all the factors that are critical to your success. Best of luck with your 2015 diet, we hope we have inspired you try to tackle this issue and given you the confidence to succeed. If you would like a callback from one of our team or would like to see a demo of the Claritum system then sign up now. Contact us to find out how we can help you.