Tropic’s Post

2 DAYS LEFT TO GO 💰 Grab your seat with #CFO Russell Lester and #Procurement Head Michael Shields. Explore strategies and trends that will impact how your org spends money and invests in various programs in 2025. Save your spot now! 👉 https://lnkd.in/g9UVHAfb

Would you rather: Save 2% on $1M spend OR Save 40% on a $100K deal? Saving 2% on a $1M spend item may require lots of effort and lead to minimal results. Whereas saving 40% on a $100K deal might be an easier lift and yield higher results. When driving cost savings, it’s important to remember ▶ Your largest savings opportunities ARE NOT always tied to your largest suppliers. Oftentimes, teams believe they can achieve immediate impact by focusing on the top 20% of spend (or the top 20% of suppliers). 💡 But as Michael Shields says, “Instead of focusing on the largest spend items, focus on the largest opportunity items.” Not only can you drive meaningful savings this way, but you prioritize your time by identifying which vendors have high savings potential and need your attention (and which don't). To find these opportunities? The key is to use reliable vendor price benchmarks. 📊 #procurement #finance #spendmanagement

Wishing a warm welcome to a group of new Tropic teammates that joined us this past quarter 🌴 Whether you've joined early, mid, or late Q3, we're excited to have you as part of the team and see you impact the business! 👋 ICYMI: We're hiring. Check out our open roles here: https://lnkd.in/gCUgyTYy

Budget tip for budget owners 👉 If you unlock efficiencies and savings in the business (which is GREAT), put it to the "Center of Table." This approach means putting those efficiencies and savings in front of your CFO and leadership, where they'll collab on the best ways to reinvest this money across the team to achieve company goals/targets. And very often, budget owners get to reinvest some of this money back with a solid case anyways. If you're running a sound #spendmanagement process and combine that with reliable benchmark data/insights, you'll unlock MANY efficiencies and savings as it is... ...so why not goal yourself on the expense side when it comes to tech spend? As #CFO Russell Lester says, "There's no reason in your planning process that you couldn't look at your tech spend relative to benchmarks and say it's clear we got room to reduce."

Integrating Slack with Tropic makes #spendmanagement even easier. 💰 You can approve a new purchase, get notified about an upcoming renewal, or tag in a teammate in a purchase conversation — all within in a quick Slack message. These activities seamlessly sync back to Tropic, giving you one source of truth while driving process adoption in a channel your users are already familiar with. Now that's what we call a Buyer's Paradise. 🌴

NEXT WEEK: Grab an afternoon coffee break with CFO Brew and Tropic ☕ Be strategic, manage all tech spend, oversee operations (and more) - the pressure on CFOs is sky high, just ask Russell Lester how he manages it all. He'll be talking about the office of the CFO with Head of Procurement & Strategy Michael Shields... ...even revealing some interesting trends from our new #spendmanagement research, which impact how companies like yours may move in 2025. 👋 Save your seat here and see you October 2nd! https://lnkd.in/g9UVHAfb

How do you budget: Peanut butter spread OR vendor-level spend estimates? There's no right or wrong answer when establishing budgets for 2025, but #CFO Russell Lester prefers setting vendor-level spend estimates over giving budget owners one lump sum to spread, spend, and manage. Here's why 👇 1. Variance analysis becomes much easier to do (understand why did expenses come in different than you expected?) 2. Fast forwards the rigor and control that Finance will get to anyway (so why not get granular at the vendor level/do this sooner in the budgeting process?) Russell and Michael Shields’ dissect this below. Listen to the full poolside chat in the comments. 🏝 #finance #spendmanagement