Good tech knows good tech, which is why so many software and tech companies trust spend management solutions to streamline everything. From eliminating time-draining manual tasks and replacing them with speedy approvals to powering accurate expense data transfer, the right spend management solution can give tech finance teams more time and better visibility to support strategy and growth.
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Can you imagine being tech-focused across your organisation, innovating, disrupting, and growing fast, but using spend management processes that are still in the dark ages?
Your tech company is inherently forward-thinking, but if your spend management systems aren’t, it’s time to ditch the manual, error-riddled processes in favour of real-time visibility and unmatched efficiency.
Picture your current spend management process. Is it fraught with second verification delays, and/or do your users share a company credit card? Both of these things are going to give you a major problem: Company-wide inefficiencies.
It doesn’t have to be that way. With the right spend management software, you could improve efficiencies (no more manual data entry or receipt chasing), take complete control over spend without sacrificing agility, and save time (a lot of time).
Take Payhawk customers, for example. They save around 55,000 hours per year on manual data entry, an average of two days per month per customer. Instead of manual data entry, these days can be used for strategic planning, forecasting, budget tweaking, and more.
Oscar-winning visual tech company, Chaos Group, save five days a month just by automating their expense processes (without sacrificing financial control or visibility):
Ivan Slavchev, System Administrator at Chaos Group, says:
Simple approval chains, the ability to top up funds without going through a complicated process, visible costs and invoices, and receipts collected in a single place save us many, many hours a month in back-and-forth chats and emails.
If, like Chaos Group, you have people spending money on projects, managing subscriptions (SaaS spend), and monitoring cash flow, you need an expense solution that will let you balance flexible spending and control.
As a finance leader at a software company, you know manual processes just don’t fit in with your tech-savvy setup. And you’re not alone.
According to The New CFO Tech Gap report (research conducted with over 1,000 finance leaders), only 36% of technology and telecom companies feel their fintech stack truly meets their needs. The good news? There are some seriously intelligent spend management solutions out there that can entirely transform how you manage business expenses.
Here are nine top ways the right software can help you overcome the most common challenges:
Subscriptions can quickly start sprawling. They're easy to sign up for, but also easy to forget about. You've probably got a massive amount of SaaS subscriptions spread across teams, with little control or clear approval, begging the question: Do you know what you're spending each month?
The average business has a staggering 291 SaaS subscriptions, so if you're in a similar boat — whether your subscriptions are marketing tools or IT software — chances are, you're paying for underutilised or duplicate subscriptions without even knowing it.
With subscription management features, you can understand at a glance how you're spending your money, what subscriptions you're using, and whether the price hike is worth the budget commitment.
If your team has to raise a new PO for every monthly billed SaaS subscription, you'll be pleased to know there's a better way: Recurring POs.
No more chasing employees to raise the PO or manually tracking approvals. Instead, you can allow for just one PO with a billing schedule, creating sub-purchase orders for each monthly payment to drive efficiency, accuracy, and speed.
If you’re a matrix organisation (i.e. one where employees report to multiple managers, functional managers and product managers, for example), then the approval process can be a major obstacle in the expense management process.
But there’s good news: you can speed up the process and remove finance team dependency in one go with expense notes and customisable workflow features. To empower cardholders and budget owners, create approval workflows that closely control how users spend money and who signs off on spending, leaving no penny unaccounted for and keeping your comms on the system. No more easy-to-lose, chasing communications outside the platform
Struggling with repetitive comms in or outside of the platform? At Payhawk, our smart expense notes are helping make expense processes more efficient than ever. This AI-generated note learns from previous expenses to fill in the note field for you, meaning you avoid any gaps in information and get an even more streamlined process.
If your expenses occur on a cross-charge basis, this can obscure the source of cost and the resulting ROI and lead to poor strategic decision-making.
At Payhawk, however, we support you to accurately track and analyse both team and project-based expenses, however you need, with unlimited custom dimensions.
Custom dimensions mean better financial insights, better budget alignment with operational goals, and the ability to tailor your financial reports for maximum impact. And with some Payhawk integrations like QuickBooks Online allowing for cross-charging, it’s never been easier to create bills straight from expenses.
As you scale, your processes become more complex. You hire more people, expand into new locations, empower more people to spend company money, your organisational hierarchy expands, your tax requirements multiply, and there are more people to approve expenses — the list goes on.
As Konstantin Dzhengozov, CFO at Payhawk, describes:
You can't scale without the right technology. You always have to ask: What does my finance function look like now? And will this setup still work in 6 months, 12 months, or 24 months?
With a multi-entity management system, finance teams get a clear, real-time view of spend across every entity, sliced how they want. That means less time chasing data and more time focusing on strategy, insights, and driving real value as the business grows.
The good news is that you're already immersed in the tech world, so converting users to a new solution shouldn't be too much of a slog. Why waste time educating employees on how to use legacy systems that don't integrate with one another?
Getting them onboard with a fully integrated tech-driven spend management solution will make everyone's lives easier. An intuitive mobile app makes expenses straightforward, and with OCR, it's almost impossible to submit incorrect expense data.
You need a system that everyone can use from day one, and that's Payhawk. Your employees need little to no training, you can easily add custom/user-friendly expense category names, and you get a rapid time to ROI (customers often capture ROI after just ten months, which is considerably faster than many competitors: G2).
If your employees travel frequently to attend events or visit customers, they’re no doubt generating a big pile of receipts. Paying for fuel, lunch on the go, travel, accommodation, and more. They’re either making good use of the company card or creating a lot of reimbursable expenses. Either way, it’s creating work for your finance teams.
With Payhawk, you never need to reimburse personal spend again. Receipts are captured in real time, so you stay in control without chasing paperwork.
If a team member needs more funds, they can simply submit a request—no delays, no awkward workarounds. You can even set auto-approvals for smaller amounts to keep things running smoothly.
And the experience? Your employees will actually enjoy using it. Our G2 ratings are consistently high, with reviews like the below:
The [Payhawk] app's clean design makes navigating a breeze, and submitting expenses, especially via the mobile app, is incredibly fast. I appreciate not having to wrestle with complicated interfaces anymore. It's user-friendly, efficient, and has freed up valuable time. If you're looking for a stress-free expense solution, Payhawk is definitely worth considering.
Giving travelling employees their very own card might sound like a terrible idea to some CFOs, who fear spiralling out-of-control spend.
But by using spend controls and limits, you can proactively control how much money each employee has access to, for what reason, and the spend each card allows. For example, you might decide to generate a single-use card for a particular project, which deactivates after a certain timeframe. Or you might block spend at certain times or for certain goods.
There are 100s of ways to build the policies and controls that work for you.
Plus, you can benchmark all spend against budgets and projects to ensure it aligns with company policies and make changes and adjustments as you need.
Manual data entry is outdated — and risky. It’s prone to errors, duplicates, and wasted time.
Relying on people to move data between systems drains your resources and slows everything down. There’s a better way.
Native ERP integrations are something we’re obsessed with at Payhawk. We seamlessly integrate with many market-leading ERPs (QuickBooks Online, DATEV, NetSuite and more), helping you reduce the likelihood of human errors and, in turn, improving the quality of your financial data.
Eliminating confusion about reimbursable expenses or what employees can spend company funds on is essential to controlling spend. That means creating crystal clear expense policies should be a priority.
At Payhawk, you can create digital spend policies to ensure automatic expense compliance. Create merchant whitelists and blacklists, set spending limits, decide whether users can request more funds, build complex approval workflows to suit your organisation and more.
As part of our onboarding and implementation process, we train your team through live training sessions to ensure smooth adoption. We want you up and running as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Martin Reindl, Director of Implementation at Payhawk, says:
Our implementation managers act like Payhawk consultants — guiding setup, doing the heavy lifting, and tailoring everything to your needs. We import key data, connect your ERP and HRIS systems, and suggest features that add value. Then, we train your team and support you through the rollout to ensure a smooth start.
Find a spend management solution that invests in training to make sure there’s high team adoption.
The last thing you want is another standalone tech solution perpetuating fragmented and unreliable expense data.
Find a solution that integrates with not only the market-leading players in ERP and accounting systems but also offers the ability to develop custom APIs to suit any software.
It’s an exciting time in the fintech industry. AI is transforming how finance teams work by automating time-consuming tasks like answering employee questions and navigating expense management.
At Payhawk, AI powers features like the financial controller agent and OCR technology to boost accuracy and efficiency. You get reliable data and helpful suggestions, so you can confidently make faster, smarter business decisions.
As a tech company, you need to embrace technology in all aspects of your business. It has the power to streamline processes, boost productivity and efficiency, save time and money, and generate unparalleled financial visibility across all your entities.
By closely controlling spend, while giving employees the freedom to spend within pre-defined limits, you can ensure that all spend is accountable and valuable, which will help propel your organisation into exciting new territories and growth.
Ready to see Payhawk spend management in action? Request your personalised product demo.
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.
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Whether you have tens, hundreds, or thousands of employees, we’re making your business spend work for you, giving you control over spending at scale with a single solution. Say goodbye to tedious finance tasks, schedule a demo with us today.
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