End of year budget spending is the opportunity to use remaining funds before the year is over. As the new year draws ever closer, you might find yourself looking for smart ways to spend any extra funds that remain in your budget, especially if they do not roll over to the next term.
Despite the urge to act now or lose it, it’s critical to think strategically about your vision and the goals set for your team. When it comes to third party risk management (TPRM), your investment could positively impact other areas of your organization—from bolstering efficiency to helping Security, Legal, and Procurement to get ahead of the imminent growth in your vendor population.
The best way to spend the end of year budget will be unique to each company, but there are some common questions that can help you make the right choice. As you decide how to use your end of year budget, ask yourself the following questions.
How to spend your end of year budget: 5 quick questions
- What is your organization’s strategy for the upcoming year? Will you need any additional resources, tools, or technology to achieve those goals?
- Are there opportunities to streamline operations, automate processes, or outsource services?
- Would you benefit from external, professional expertise to achieve those goals that seem unattainable with the current setup?
- What resources would be beneficial for your team to help them perform their tasks more efficiently? Could any of your current tools use an upgrade?
- Will your company grow exponentially in the next year, thus engaging with more third party vendors?
Thinking ahead about where your company wants to be makes it easier to allocate your end of year budget to getting there. Once you know what you want to achieve, consider the following ways to spend your remaining dollars.
1. Adopt new technology to streamline processes
The end of the year is the perfect time to take inventory of your current toolkit and identify any gaps in your business processes that are painful for your department.
Download this TPRM Checkup to Review Your Current TPRM Efforts
As we embrace digital transformation, investing in a technology platform that makes your job easier is always a smart way to spend your remaining budget.
Think which processes could be improved by new technology: manual vendor risk assessments, issue tracking, or annual reassessments, to name a few, could probably use automation to increase efficiency and reduce repetitive tasks.
If your company has experienced significant growth over the past year, it may be increasingly difficult to keep track of new and ongoing third party vendor relationships. If you don’t currently have visibility over your entire vendor ecosystem, think about investing your remaining budget in a vendor risk management platform like ThirdPartyTrust.
It can provide your organization with a more effective way to eliminate silos, reduce the time it takes to complete vendor risk assessments, track progress, increase visibility, and work together more efficiently.
The benefits of investing your end of year budget in technology are clear:
- It will save time and improve productivity
- It will allow you to focus on higher value projects
- Team morale will boost once you get rid of manual, repetitive tasks
- The improvements will outweigh the cost of training
- There will be room for innovation, leading to increased sales and revenue
In addition, many SaaS tools require upfront subscription payments for the year rather than recurring monthly payments, which makes them convenient places to allocate your end of year budget surpluses. You will spend now for work that can be delivered later.
2. Invest in managed services opportunities
Managed services are those where you outsource the responsibility for implementing and maintaining a business process or function. They are designed to handle the daily operations of your specialized applications, in order to improve operations and reduce costs.
Did you know vendor management can be a managed service?
TPRM as a managed service (TPRMaaS) can make it easier to establish and operate your third-party risk management program, combining a purpose-built tool with technical and security expertise.
Using end of year budget resources on managed services can have a greater impact on your company’s bottom line, by having risk management operations planned, built, and run as a service.
Contracting an advisor and paying an upfront fee or retainer guarantees that the work will occur within the coming year, while simultaneously disposing of remaining funds.
3. Consider TPRM in Your End of Year Budget
If you’re still unsure as to where to allocate your remaining funds, consider vendor risk management and, more extensively, third party risk management (TPRM).
It’s highly likely that your organization is facing the following challenges, which makes TPRM increasingly critical:
- There are more vendors in the supply chain than last year
- The risk of a third party data breach keeps going up
- Regulation is forcing your company to take action
As business goes global and more third party vendors enter your network, there’s always a chance you might need to double your third party risk management efforts. But how to do so when you can’t double the resources?
TPRM automation tools like ThirdPartyTrust are the perfect ally to increase your risk assessment capacity with the same resources, while adding value to your business by reducing enterprise risk, showing a robust security posture to your customers and partners, and increasing visibility over risk exposure.
Whether you’re taking your first steps with manual vendor risk assessments, or trying to scale your program, ThirdPartyTrust can help with a purpose-built workflow management, document repository and process automation platform. You’ll be able to get your TPRM program out of email & spreadsheets, with access to 17,000+ vendor security profiles already assessed by the community, and 10+ data providers allowing for greatly accelerated continuous monitoring.
Time to Refocus and Set Your Goals
The end of year is a busy time. You’re focused on closing deals and planning your strategy for the next year, which includes looking for opportunities to spend your extra end of year budget on products, services, or solutions to take a step further.
You can’t go wrong putting extra dollars into technology. Your toolkit should accommodate opportunities to alleviate the stress on your team, whether it’s understaffed or spending a lot of time on low-level maintenance or administrative tasks.
The best way to spend your end of year budget will be the one that best matches your organization’s immediate and long term vision and needs. When comparing different options, weigh the potential return on investment for each one, and choose the route that is most likely to achieve your desired results.
Let us show you why accelerating your TPRM with ThirdPartyTrust is a smart way of spending your end of year budget. Talk to an expert today.
Vendor Risk Assessments Should Not Be a Killer
Organizations face rising regulatory pressure coupled by increasing risks. Till now, the process to assess and reduce third party risk has been slow and time consuming, with manual questionnaires and repetitive requests.
This strategy guide explains how to make TPRM easier, solving security and compliance problems for both enterprises and vendors.
