Eight must-have financial control features for enterprise businesses

For enterprises, staying financially compliant, detecting risk and fraud, improving operational efficiency, and making informed decisions for growth are essential. To achieve this, you need the right financial control features. Here are nine key features to consider when choosing your enterprise spend management solution.

Best practices when developing a financial control framework

A financial control framework isn't one-size-fits-all; you must tailor it to your business structure and specific needs. You need to build something flexible to your business structure and services, so keep these key points in mind:

Establish internal policies and procedures

Build a framework that's easy for employees to follow by creating clear internal policies. With Payhawk, you can integrate spend policies directly into the tools your spenders use to pay. This connection between solution, card, and app ensures policy compliance and boosts accountability.

Plus, the solution is so user-friendly that your team will want to use it. See Hannah Dobson, VP of Sales at GDS Group.

Payhawk has saved me time, but more importantly, it's saved my team time. It's a dream because now I can get my team to do their own expenses quickly and efficiently.

Implement segregation of duties

While saving time is crucial for efficiency, dividing expense management tasks across multiple people is key to preventing fraud and reducing risk. Relying on one person for all expense processing can lead to missed mistakes, burnout, and limited scalability.

So, prioritise the segregation of duties when creating and implementing your new financial control framework.

Train staff on financial controls

It sounds basic, but training your staff is essential to help you implement new frameworks or processes. Whether you've switched spend management providers or you're introducing brand new procedures, staff must be in the know.

Your chosen software company will often provide staff training to ensure high user adoption and feature utilisation. After all, you're making changes for the better, so you need to get everyone up to speed to make this implementation successful.

Director of Implementation at Payhawk, Martin Reindl, says:

At Payhawk, once the customer approves the technical setup, we roll out the solution, inviting users and creating corporate cards. We're built to be a very intuitive system and have excellent user reviews on G2. Even so, we're always there to guide the customer, offering live training sessions to staff to help them understand how to use Payhawk with zero delays.

Implement checks and balances

Of course, segregation of duties can help you keep everything above board, but what else can you do to ensure proper financial control?

From multi-level approval workflows (to run a tight ship no matter the expense type) to automatic low-balance notifications and advanced card controls, you need to remain in the driver's seat at all times across all entities. Otherwise, financial control can easily slip, and before you know it, you're making business decisions based on guesswork.

Enterprise financial control features for better financial control

Isn't it great when you realise your spend management solution comes with a whole host of shiny features? Only to find out you don't actually need half of them…
But at Payhawk, we only build and innovate on features that you'll definitely use. Our financial control features will help you spot financial patterns, collect accurate financial data, and, above all else, improve efficiency across the board.

1. Automated compliance checks

Without spend compliance, you create a culture of ‘whatever goes’, which means employees spend how they like, ultimately resulting in zero financial control.

Finding a solution that features automated compliance checks is a game-changer. Payhawk enables admins and accountants to create bespoke digital spend policies built into your expense management process and implement advanced card controls, making it almost impossible to spend non-compliantly.

Another great way to ensure compliance is to use our purchase order three-way matching technology in our procure-to-pay solution. This tech automatically matches invoices, purchase orders, and receipt notes to flag discrepancies.

2. Real-time monitoring and reporting

Call us old-fashioned, but you need to see the finances to have financial control. With Payhawk, you have real-time access to all financial information, making monitoring spending and reporting on it a breeze.

Do your shareholders need a quick update on marketing spend? No worries; filter your data, export it, and share it. Or perhaps a big project is coming up, and you need to ensure plenty of funds? No problem; navigate to your Payhawk portal to view real-time finances, see what payments you have coming up and plan accordingly.

And as soon as spend happens, it’s automatically reconciled with your ERP or accounting system, making manual reconciliation a thing of the past.

3. OCR technology

Say goodbye to tedious and unnecessary mistakes on expense reports with our optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Cardholders can snap a quick picture within the Payhawk mobile app, and our AI camera works hard to automatically extract all relevant data, including the total amount, data, and name of products.

This straightforward process ensures all expense submissions are accurate and accounted for, making your job in finance easier (and the cardholder can focus on their day job, too).

4. ESG reporting features

It’s essential to adapt your financial controls to ever-changing business environments, including understanding your environmental impact. Customers, shareholders, investors — you name it — are all keen for companies to embrace sustainability where possible. With ESG reporting features from Payhawk (supported by our partner Lune), you can take financial control of your Scope 3 emissions by collecting emission estimations from all Payhawk card payments.

Calculating CO2 emissions can be complex, but our ESG reporting tool simplifies the process. It enables you to identify which departments or spending categories contribute the most to your carbon footprint, allowing you to create targeted policies for improvement. For instance, if travel is a significant source, you can introduce measures to reduce air travel in favour of lower-emission alternatives like trains. Additionally, the tool provides valuable insights into your suppliers’ environmental impact, empowering you to engage with them and collaboratively reduce the overall climate impact of your operations.

5. Automated card blocking

Have you got an employee who’s failed to submit an expense on time? Simply set up auto card blocking features to stop them from spending any more — until they’ve submitted outstanding expenses.

An automated card-blocking feature really helps encourage repeat offenders to improve their expense etiquette.

6. Multiple expense filters

Filtering your expenses saves time when reviewing (particularly when you have multiple entities), so choosing from multiple expense filters makes it even easier for your admins and accountants to review all consolidated spend efficiently — filter by project or cost centre, for example.

Expense filters allow finance team leaders to better understand current and upcoming spend in granular detail, which means more accurate cash flow forecasting and budget planning.

7. Custom approval workflows

As an enterprise, your organisational structure might be complex, which, in turn, makes managing finances complex. With many cardholders and projects to fund, expenses can easily get out of control and you lose the ability to remain in tight control of spend.

Custom approval workflows make expense management, invoice management, and purchase management straightforward. From purchase order requests to business travel expense submissions, you can craft specific approval workflows for every type of spending possible.

8. Advanced card controls

Having advanced control over how cardholders spend is crucial to budget management. Payhawk’s card controls help businesses enforce spending policies and protect against overspending.

Here are some card controls you can put in place:

• Geolocation restrictions to limit spending to specific countries or regions
• Time restrictions to enable card usage only during business hours
• Merchant and category restrictions to ensure employees use preferred suppliers and avoid non-compliant spending

Spend management software that works for your enterprise

Access to financial control features like those mentioned above can be a game-changer for any business. What makes our software truly stand out is its accessibility — everyone in the company, from the CEO and CFO to the newest intern in the marketing team, can benefit from it. We believe corporate cards should be a standard benefit, not a luxury, and that managing expenses through reimbursements should be a thing of the past.

At Payhawk, we see spend management and financial stability as key parts of our company culture. That's why every employee gets their own corporate card. This also makes organising team-building events much easier.

Seamless integrations with ERP, accounting and HRIS systems

Having a tool that gives you access to all the above control features is nothing without a useful integration. If you have to log out and log back into disparate systems to access data, it's not going to work for you long-term, particularly as you scale or open multiple entities.

At Payhawk, our solution integrates with your current tech stack, making life easier, data accessible to everyone, and centralising all financial systems. We can integrate with market-leading ERP, accounting, business travel, and HRIS systems.

And, when you're exporting and sharing your expense data, you can make use of our powerful Excel and CSV template builder to help you streamline your accounting process.

Plus bulk features to make everything quicker

As an enterprise business, you have a lot to manage, from an expanding pool of employees to non-standardised processes and procedures across multiple entities. As you grow and scale, you need a flexible solution that suits how you do business. And that means using bulk features to make tasks more efficient through automation.

Payhawk helps you effortlessly manage multiple entities with ease. Transfer funds and manage expenses for your US, EU or UK entity all from the same platform.

Mercell: Implementing financial controls successfully

Tendering and bidding platform Mercell says Payhawk spend policies and card controls have provided them with the best way to mitigate fraud while giving employees the right level of autonomy — all from inside a defined framework.

Having an expense policy built into the tool is key for enterprise financial control. It makes the expense management process much easier for both employees and admins.

Mercell CFO, Leon Steenbrink says:

I like using Payhawk because it meets our targets, making card usage more efficient and improving data analysis, especially on spending. I also appreciate the increased control over who can approve what.

Having transparency around who's spent what and empowering employees to spend freely within a framework means the Mercell finance team can maintain a close eye on spending and make suggestions to optimise budgets.

Leon continues: "The biggest benefits of Payhawk? A combination of efficiency and additional control... and I'm happy with both — because that's exactly what we need in finance."

Feeling inspired? Then, request a Payhawk demo and learn more about how financial control features can help your business keep spend on track and in the right places.