How to Enhance Financial Forecasting and Leverage Finance Automation to Navigate Turbulent Times

As recent events illustrate once again, businesses cannot always foresee economic uncertainty or its intensity. But with finance automation, AI-fueled solutions, and a clear strategy, organizations can improve financial forecasting, cost control, and agility to weather that uncertainty.

You may not need the statistics to acknowledge the economic shifts taking place since the start of 2025, but they validate the extent of the challenges business leaders face and their urgent need to find ways to address them.

• As of early 2025: 41% of finance leaders told SAP Concur that worsening economic conditions were their top external challenge.
• In the second week of April: With U.S. trade tariffs, countries’ countermoves, and concerns about supply chains and inflation, the Wall Street Journal found 57% of small business CEOs expect the economy to worsen in the next 12 months – a 43-percentage-point increase since January.

Instead of reflexively cutting costs and pausing efforts to overhaul and fine-tune processes and technology, it’s more important than ever that finance leaders continue these initiatives to strengthen financial forecasting and other spend management capabilities. With better spending visibility and insights, leaders can identify cost-saving opportunities, maintain a tighter grasp on spending, and more readily adjust to strengths regardless of the economic outlook.

If there’s anything that could in any way, shape, or form be seen as a benefit from the pandemic, it’s that we’ve grown even more accustomed to adapting. Of course, there’s plenty you can’t control, so let’s learn about some things you can do:

• Collaborate cross-functionally on strategies to strengthen forecasting and navigate economic volatility, including honing your spend management approach, refining metrics, and aligning short- and long-term goals.
• Leverage AI in finance to gain efficiency and insights in such areas as travel bookings, receipt and invoice management, and expense auditing.
• Consider SAP Concur solutions and services for managing spend requests, budgets, and data insights to enhance forecasting capabilities.

Strategies to strengthen financial forecasting

Strengthened financial forecasting is a result of carefully applying strategic spending management, finance automation, risk management, invoice management, artificial intelligence (AI), and other levers to improve operations and agility.

Here are strategies and mindsets, many informed by our CFO Insights research, that you can adopt to help navigate economic change:

Hone spend management strategy

There’s no better time to develop a consistent approach to how money is spent, so you can empower the timely forecasting and decision-making that bolster cost control and ease volatility’s effects. Is your existing spend management strategy able to flex with economic conditions? Can you adjust spend policies quickly and communicate them to your workforce? Instituting a strategic spend management strategy and using integrated travel, expense, and invoice solutions streamlines the user experience, raises compliance and productivity, enables better budget management, and strengthens financial predictions.

Get an early grip on costs

The best way to control spending is before it happens, so consider a pre-spend request tool for travel and other expenses. Advanced solutions utilize AI to estimate costs and ensure policy compliance, saving employees valuable time while providing management with comprehensive spending visibility. Embedding pre-spend approvals into your workflows enables more accurate forecasting, versus updating your forecasts after expense reports roll in.

Refine metrics

Do you know how much time your business spends each year auditing expense reports? Or how much time travelers and auditors spend tracking, inputting, and chasing manual receipts? Or how much you’re overpaying, because manually tracking mileage typically adds 15% extra miles vs. GPS-powered mobile apps? It might be time to run the numbers and find out. With a better baseline, you can identify savings opportunities, improve budget and forecasting accuracy, and make the most of tight resources.

Align spend policies with long-term goals

It’s easy to get knocked off point by economic disruption. Naturally, finance leaders must quickly make forecasting adjustments and seek ways to cut costs, but this agility shouldn’t inhibit the pursuit of growth, innovation, and other long-term goals it carefully set. So while you can’t cut all travel and spend, you can guide employees to choose options that fit the current and long-term needs of your business.

Value collaboration

Our recent Insights survey found few CFOs – just 9% – thought that driving growth was a responsibility they should share. The findings point to a need for broader collaboration across the C-suite. Managing costs and technology and improving financial forecasting are timely venues for teamwork, especially amid turmoil.

How to leverage AI and finance automation solutions for financial forecasting

AI and forecasting go together, as do AI and risk management. Overall, AI in finance increasingly supplies value right from adoption by automating manual processes and improving productivity.

Finance leaders have great expectations for AI, with 67% envisioning more accurate forecasting, 65% and 61% hoping for improved efficiency. Here are specific ways AI-fueled solutions are fulfilling those expectations to control costs, provide agility, and deliver other advantages:

• Trip cost estimates are assembled with a simple input from an employee, minimizing booking and approval time, and giving companies increased compliance and an early opportunity to manage costs and make forecasts.
• Paper receipts are captured by travelers snapping a picture. The mobile app automatically extracts essential details and funnels them to an expense report, significantly decreasing report rejections. When report approvals speed up, so can your forecasting.
• Invoices in a variety of formats are scanned and key data extracted and populated into fields using OCR, improving the finance team’s visibility into spending for stronger forecasting and cash flow management.
• Auditing, risk management, and fraud detection become more effective as AI examines and cross-checks far more expense reports, receipts, and invoices in less time than any human can. With faster and more accurate auditing, you can achieve more precise financial forecasting.
• Spotting patterns and behaviors in your spending, invoice management, and other areas can fortify cost control, decision-making and analysis, and forecasting.

Improve spending certainty and forecasting with SAP Concur solutions

At SAP Concur, our solutions are built to increase business certainty and agility in times of both stability and instability.

With three-plus decades of T&E data and over 46,000 customers worldwide, SAP Concur has a wealth of information to draw upon. Bringing together AI and finance may sound like a new innovation, but SAP Concur has increasingly – and responsibly – incorporated it into our solutions for years. As the market leader in T&E management, our experience allows us to devise solutions that meet ever-evolving business needs, such as the faster travel bookings and comprehensive audits described above.

Four solutions and services specifically strengthen financial forecasting and supply insights to help finance leaders navigate turbulence.

Concur Request uses AI to assemble trip cost estimates, automating spending requests and approvals, simplifying the experience for employees, and minimizing expense rejections. Managers gain a tool to better enforce compliance and control cash flow because they see expenses from conception to conclusion.

Budget captures data from our travel, request, expense, and invoice solutions and displays spending on an easy-to-use dashboard. This allows businesses to see spending before, during, and after it occurs, enabling quick adjustments and stronger forecasting.

Intelligence integrates data, uses interactive dashboards with tailored insights, monitors budgets, and allows businesses to access standard report templates or create customized reports that meet their needs. As a result, they can better forecast for what’s ahead.

Consultative Intelligence deepens insights and makes the most of SAP Concur data. With the service, our reporting and analytics experts work with you to deliver customized reports, analytics, and insights that meet your organization’s specific needs.

During good times and stability, organizations might get away with less-than-ideal spending control and just-okay analytics and budgeting. But with economic uncertainty and concern about recession growing, the time to act is now. By using all the strategies and solutions available to bolster your financial forecasting, you’ll also boost your adaptability and resilience.