Group CFO? Get the complete guide to multi-entity spend control (feat' top CFO insights)

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Group CFO? Get the complete guide to multi-entity spend control (feat' top CFO insights)

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24 Jul 2025
3 minutes

Cash flow clarity: The best spend control software of 2025

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Quick summary

Are you making high-stakes decisions without complete visibility into your company’s cash flow? That’s a risk no finance leader can afford. Find out how the right spend management tech puts you back in control — and see which solution actually lives up to the promise.

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It’s a scary stat, but 98% of CFOs admit they make big decisions with only half the picture. And in today’s finance landscape, where the CFO’s role is more strategic than ever, that’s a huge problem.

The old ways of managing spend just don’t cut it. Manual processes can’t keep up with growing complexity. As companies scale, more people spend company funds, often remotely, across multiple teams and locations. Staying on top of that spend? Nearly impossible without the right tools.

Take a 200-person SaaS company, for example. It’s not unusual for them to juggle around 170 cloud apps, spread across multiple legal entities and cost centres — each one generating spend that needs to be tracked, approved, and reconciled. Without real-time visibility, you’re constantly on the back foot — and your cash flow is at risk.

That’s where comprehensive, AI-powered spend management comes in. It helps you manage both “after-the-fact expense reimbursement” while also preventing overspending and ensuring accuracy with features like embedded card controls, P2P tools, and more.

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Spend control versus expense management

People often confuse spend management with expense management. Yes, both involve company money, but they’re not the same thing.

Spend management is the big picture: budgets, procurement, vendor payments, forecasting — the whole lot.

Expense management is narrower. It’s about tracking spend after it happens and reimbursing employees.

Expense-first tools can log costs, but they can’t stop off-policy spending or show you where the rest of your money’s going. Tools like ours, at Payhawk, on the other hand, cover it all — from office birthday cakes to £100k SaaS contracts — total control, in one platform.

Seven features to look for in spend control software

So, what should you be looking for from a spend control software? Here are seven features that will improve how you manage spend for good.

  1. Pre-spend approvals: Stop surprise costs before they hit

Make sure the sign-off on spending is proactive rather than reactive. That means users can submit purchase requests and attach any necessary supporting documentation, such as quotes, and your designated approver can sign it off through custom-built approval workflows.

You should be able to attach these workflows to card-fund requests, invoices, budgets and full purchase-order flows.

  1. Dynamic card rules: Tailor limits to every team & scenario

Creating specific card rules for individuals, teams, or at a company-wide level is essential for enforcing compliant spending. Dynamic card rules can include anything from issuing single-use or pre-order cards to setting recurring spending limits and restricting merchant or vendor categories.

  1. "Zero-balance" cards: Fund only after sign-off for 100% compliance

By issuing cards with a £0 balance, you can control spend even more closely, only giving fund access when it's been approved through the custom-built workflow. Look for a solution that offers this, and you'll have another way to ensure 100% compliance with spending policies, which means unparalleled spending visibility.

  1. Budget guardrails & real-time alerts: Catch overruns in the moment

Find a tool that offers automatic owner notifications when you hit spending thresholds. This will keep budget utilisation aligned with plans for every department or project, so you're always aware of all spending before it impacts the bottom line or cash flow.

  1. Policy-aware user experience: Guide employees to the right choice, every time

Companies lose over £60,000 on average to out-of-policy spending, and although many factors can contribute to these significant losses, one reason can be a lack of awareness on the part of employees.

Look for spend control software with policy compliance built into both the web and mobile user interfaces, meaning only compliant options are available to employees.

  1. Multi-level approvals & delegation: Reflect any org chart or hierarchy

The ability to assign specific approvers for different types of fund requests or spending categories means you can perfectly cater to complex organisational sign-off processes while minimising approval delays.

Ensure you can designate multiple approvers and get segregation of duties set up and in full force, reducing the sign-off burden for one person. Make sure that once your designated approver signs the fund request off, money is transferred immediately to the employee's card.

  1. Real-time anomaly detection (AI): Flag duplicates and fraud in seconds

Anomaly detection is built into many finance AI agents, so you don't have to worry about policy violations or spotting unusual transactions.

The AI agent scans every transaction and invoice to detect duplicates, outliers and other anomalies all within a few seconds. So, you can have ultimate confidence that your spend data is as accurate as possible.

Best spend control software solutions of 2025

What's on the market? Here's a spend control software comparison with eight top providers to consider.

Payhawk

With Payhawk, you can manage everything related to spending under one roof: AP, invoices, supplier management, procure-to-pay, reimbursements, corporate cards, budgets, and more.

Innovation is at the forefront of our delivery, and we're always building and testing platform features to help you improve visibility and compliance. Our clever tech does the heavy lifting so you can focus on what really matters — driving strategy.

With Payhawk, you can say goodbye to chasing missing documentation, checking POs and invoices to ensure they match the receipt notes, and double-checking supplier details. And hello to ultimate spend visibility across all entities, granular insights and effortless spend process management. Slash manual finance work by up to 90%, recoup those VAT receipts and let your finance team focus on strategy, not chasing receipts.

Some Payhawk features include:

Control

  • Custom approval flows, spend rules & cost-centres, plus zero-balance cards funded only after sign-off
  • Live budget guardrails that roll up across entities so managers see the impact before approving spend
  • In-platform comments & audit trails that replace ad-hoc Slack/email threads, keeping requestors accountable

Automation

  • AI agents + OCR data capture receipts and code invoices, automating up to 90% of manual finance work
  • ERP-native sync posts transactions instantly to NetSuite, Business Central, Xero & others
  • Auto-reconciliation matches card, bank and AP lines, surfacing duplicates in seconds

Global scale

  • Corporate Visa cards in seven currencies in 32+ countries and supplier payment via SEPA, FPS and SWIFT
  • Multi-entity management from a single dashboard
  • Multi-language, multi-VAT extraction keeps EU invoices compliant while US entities stay 1099-ready

SAP Concur

Automate expenses, travel, and invoices within one platform.

You can:

  • Unify all spend management
  • Improve the employee experience when booking travel on the go with SAP’s app
  • Integrate with leading tools (over 700 solution partners and more than 250 business apps)
  • Book hotels, flights, and car rentals through the platform
  • Automate AP processes to ensure timely vendor payments

Spendesk

Automate, centralise, and closely control all aspects of company spending with Spendesk.

You can:

  • Issue physical and virtual corporate cards
  • Create smart approval workflows
  • Tailor customisable spending limits for secure, trackable payments
  • Efficiently process expenses claims and reimbursements from the Spendesk platform
  • Access real-time analytics and reporting

Airbase

Gain control and visibility into all non-payroll expenditure with Airbase.

You can:

  • Access real-time spend analytics
  • Automate your AP and accounting processes
  • Create complex, customisable workflows
  • Automatically create expense reports
  • Automatically enforce spend policies (and watch as it blocks and flags out-of-policy spend)

Soldo

A comprehensive and flexible spend management platform, Soldo helps increase oversight and automate manually intensive admin tasks.

Some features include:

  • Set customisable spend limits and card rules
  • Issue physical, virtual and prepaid cards
  • Distribute funds in multiple currencies
  • Automatically capture, categorise and tag every transaction
  • Captures receipts and records VAT with Soldo’s mobile app

Coupa

An AI-driven spend management platform helping companies optimise both direct and indirect spend while improving visibility.

You can:

  • Integrate with ERPs and other market-leading tools
  • Real-time dashboards to monitor spend
  • Manage direct and indirect spend, procurement, expenses and payments all under one roof
  • Algorithms detect fraud and help you manage VAT and compliance
  • Coupa Pay ensures simple payments, including direct employee reimbursements

Brex

AI-powered spend management platform helping organisations of all sizes automate and streamline their expenses.

You can:

  • Centralise spending in one platform
  • Create and embed customisable spend policies into every transaction
  • Automatically collect receipts and match them using OCR technology
  • Issue both physical and virtual cards and reimburse in local currencies
  • Brex assistant helps answer staff queries and streamline processes

Expensify

Comprehensive spend management solution helping businesses control, track and optimise all spending.

You can:

  • Create, submit and approve reimbursements automatically
  • Issue corporate cards through the platform and set customisable limits for each
  • Import existing cards to manage all spend in one place
  • Track company spend in real-time
  • Collaborate directly on every expense to minimise delays and confusion

Best practices for rolling out spend control software

Implementing new software is a big change for any organisation. It can be daunting for employees to learn to navigate new tech, leading to low adoption (which means even more fragmented processes, wasted money and poor data visibility).

To make your rollout smoother and adoption stickier, here are five important best practices to start with:

  1. Audit your current spend management processes

Sit down and assess your current workflows. This audit process will help you identify pain points and give you a good place to start when analysing software options.

Work out who buys what and where your controls and comms breakdown. Pinpointing these dark spots helps you rebuild and improve your processes to ensure ultimate efficiency.

  1. Involve budget owners early on to curb resistance

Align with your stakeholders to get them invested and take them along for the ride.

Listen to their feedback and ideas, and show them that their opinion matters throughout this process. This is essential to ensuring high user adoption.

  1. Phased implementation and integrations

Start by introducing bits at a time (something you can easily do with our modular approach to setup and implementation).

Consider starting with cards and receipt capture, then moving on to procure-to-pay and accounts payable.

Introducing corporate cards immediately means users can start spending with transparency and accountability, giving you instant visibility into business expenses.

Consider how important implementation speed is for your business. If you’re lacking cash flow visibility, for example, then it’s urgent. And here’s where “speedy boarding” comes in. At Payhawk, our customers go live in 15-20 days on average.

  1. Policy and training refreshers

Yes, provide your employees with comprehensive training, not just on the software. Discuss the policies and give regular refreshers to keep everyone on the same page and feeling confident in company expectations. Plus, clearly explain the impact on company processes if policies aren't followed.

But also select a solution that’s prized for being super user-friendly: Explore G2 and Capterra reviews to dig into how users really feel.

  1. Measure ROI continuously

Measuring ROI can feel tricky, but it doesn't have to be. Irina Anichshuk, COO & Partnerships at Kolleno (a Payhawk partner) suggests:

Even if you can't attach a hard number, you can assess if the investment solves a real pain point. Is it helping your people do more? Are your teams happier, faster, and more accurate? That's ROI, too.

And here are a few simple ways to show the value:

  • VAT reclaims: At Payhawk, we ensure receipts are captured so you never miss a reclaim opportunity. Just ask ATU — they recovered over £2 million in VAT thanks to correctly recorded receipts.
  • Time saved: We also automate up to 90% of your manual processes with AI, automation, and machine learning — think data entry, receipt matching, reimbursements, document chasing, etc. Add up the hours saved and multiply by the average hourly wage. That's your time-based ROI.
  • Ongoing improvement: Track ROI regularly to see how the value stacks up over time and spot new ways to boost efficiency and returns.

ROI = Saved hours × avg. hourly cost + extra VAT reclaimed – subscription fee

Spend control software saves you money and time

Two things give you an edge in a crowded market: saving time and cutting costs. A smart spend management platform helps you do both. With real-time visibility into every transaction, you can make faster, smarter decisions. You see exactly where your company’s money's going, hold teams accountable, and enforce policies automatically.

Need to issue a card? Set a limit? No problem — it takes seconds. You can empower teams to spend confidently within robust guardrails while automating the manual stuff behind the scenes. Book a demo to see Payhawk spend controls in action.

Trish Toovey - Principal Content Manager at Payhawk - The financial system of tomorrow
Trish Toovey
Principal Content Manager
LinkedIn

Trish Toovey works across the UK and US markets to craft content at Payhawk. Covering anything from ad copy to video scripting, Trish leans on a super varied background in copy and content creation for the finance, fashion, and travel industries.

See all articles by Trish →
Payhawk - G2 4.6 rating (600+ reviews)
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