How Facilities and Finance Teams Can Work Together to Reduce Operational Costs

What if your facilities and finance teams could unlock hidden value in every task—transforming data into real savings, reducing risks, and optimizing operations? When facilities, accounting, and procurement work together, they go beyond just managing costs—they actively drive business results.

A smart, data-driven facilities management platform lays the groundwork for this collaboration. With tools that automate tasks, streamline communication, and provide real-time insights, these teams can work together to control costs, reduce downtime, and uncover efficiencies that add up to significant savings.

When facilities and finance are aligned, they’re not just cutting expenses; they’re creating value that strengthens the bottom line.

How Can Facilities, Procurement, and Finance Work Better Together?

Facilities generate a constant stream of transactions—some small, some large—with a wide range of providers. This creates plenty of work for accounting, procurement, and facilities teams alike.

• Facilities teams need reliable providers who deliver quality work consistently.
• Procurement teams focus on securing efficient, cost-effective contracts with vendors to maximize value.
• Accounting and Finance teams work to optimize cash flow, ensure compliance, and process invoices accurately.

Our forward-thinking clients are finding smart ways to bring these teams into closer alignment, leveraging data from a facilities management platform like Fexa. By collaborating, they’re achieving stronger results, uncovering efficiencies, and driving better business outcomes.

Here are four ways these cross-functional efforts are boosting value for the entire organization.

Automation

Automation has been part of facilities management for a while, but if it only serves the FM team and leaves others with manual or duplicate work, it’s not reaching its full potential. Effective automation goes beyond saving the FM team from repetitive tasks—it reduces back-and-forth and removes bottlenecks
between facilities, accounting, and providers.

Here are a few impactful examples:

• Automated invoice compliance checks ensure that invoices only reach accounting once providers have supplied all required information.
• Automated, exception-based approvals route proposals or invoices that exceed set thresholds (e.g., repair costs over $X for certain assets) directly to engineering and procurement for further review.

Risk Mitigation

Facilities teams face a range of financial and operational risks, and a smart facilities management solution can be invaluable in reducing and avoiding costly issues. When these efforts also keep accounting, procurement, and legal informed, they deliver even greater value.

Here are some proactive ways our clients have managed risk recently:

• Standardized Checklists for Crisis Management: Built-in smart checklists ensure a consistent approach for stabilizing locations during natural disasters or civil unrest. This not only reduces risk but also provides a clear audit trail with images, timestamps, and documentation—critical for finance teams when filing insurance claims.
• Custom Fields for Accurate Cost Tracking: Custom fields can label all repair work related to recovery efforts, ensuring accurate classification. Triggered alerts and detailed reporting give accounting the timely information needed to submit claims and keep records up-to-date.
• Automated Compliance Alerts: Early alerts notify facilities and procurement teams when providers lag in providing required compliance documentation, allowing teams to act before issues escalate.

With early alerts and real-time insights into potential risk scenarios, teams can respond proactively, minimizing financial impact. Plus, by capturing and categorizing incident data, facilities, accounting, and procurement teams can work together to analyze historical trends. Powerful analytics tools then enable these teams to continuously improve their risk management processes and reduce future risks.

Efficient and Effective Asset Management

Each industry has its own unique asset needs, and a comprehensive facilities management solution should offer flexible options for managing those assets—extending their life, optimizing maintenance, and tracking trends. Here’s how efficient asset management drives results:

• Smart Preventive Maintenance: Set-and-forget preventive maintenance programs eliminate time spent manually scheduling activities. These “smart” programs can bundle provider visits to maximize efficiency or adjust timing to ensure there’s never less than a specified number of days or months between services.
• Flexible Asset Classification: A robust system lets you create customized programs and tracking for different asset types. For example, one client in home improvement tracks equipment like material handling machinery separately from their fleet, and even categorizes items like parking lot striping with unique business rules and reporting needs.
• Data-Driven Procurement: Leveraging data analytics in asset tracking enables proactive procurement strategies. For instance, one client collaborated with procurement to secure favorable contracts on major assets like HVAC, resulting in hundreds of thousands in annual savings.

Leveraging Data to Strengthen Supplier Relationships

Facilities teams manage countless transactions and provider relationships, but traditional approaches to vendor management can fall short. Treating vendors as either transactional commodities or relying too much on subjective judgments misses the mark. A data-driven approach, however, brings the real benefits facilities teams need: cost savings, efficiency, and consistent quality.

With objective, granular data, providers can clearly see where they excel and where to improve, specifically tailored to the needs of the retailer or operator. This approach drives a balance of efficiency, cost savings, and quality for every unique work order.

Facilities work can vary widely—from reactive maintenance to project-based tasks like store reconfigurations. Having the right KPIs for each type of work and clear, data-informed communication between operators and providers creates a winwin for everyone involved.

When facilities and procurement teams have immediate access to performance and pricing data, broken down by region, work type, or other key categories, they can be specific with providers on necessary improvements. This transparency helps build stronger, open relationships. For instance, if data reveals inconsistent first-time completion rates across regions, procurement can make a solid case for change, reimbursement, or even contract renegotiation.

Beyond just facilitating negotiations, a strong data foundation fosters transparency across the facilities management network. This openness supports continuous improvement and leads to better outcomes for everyone.

Conclusion

Achieving this level of collaboration between facilities, accounting, procurement, and providers relies on a platform that captures, categorizes, and connects data to drive continuous improvement.

For too many facilities teams, years of valuable insights—risk data, asset performance by class, and rogue outliers—are locked away in outdated systems or spreadsheets.

But in today’s fast-paced environment, continuous improvement is key to staying competitive. Finding new ways to save time, cut costs, improve consistency, reduce errors, and extend asset life is essential.

With the right tools, facilities teams can capture this value, often seeing a return on investment within months.