Simplifying expense management for the food and beverage industry: A CFO guide

The food and beverage industry has been around in some form forever and shows no sign of slowing. In fact, it’s predicted to hit a massive US$9.68tn in 2025, with a forecasted annual growth of 6.32%.

But while it’s a lucrative and competitive industry, there are always opportunities for further growth.

One of the most common challenges to growth (aside from rising distribution and production costs) is effective spend management. 
Without efficient spend management, including control and visibility across all your locations, suppliers, and more, your costs can quickly spiral, causing a financial headache that could lead to disaster.

Four spend management challenges in the food and beverage industry

Costs can quickly spiral in the fast-moving food and beverage sector. Ingredients spoil fast, budgets burst at the seams, shipping costs fluctuate, and so on. Good cost control (and visibility) is key to success and will help keep your business stable and support future growth.

Ingredients aside, there are some major challenges when it comes to managing finances across the food and drink industry. Here’s a short rundown of the four biggest — and how to tackle them:

1. Poor cash flow management

Delayed invoice payments both across AP and AR affect nearly half of all food and drink companies, and when you add seasonal swings and unpredictable cash flow to the mix, planning becomes tough.

You need reliable data and clear visibility across budgets, teams, and projects to stay in control of cash flow and a smart spend management solution like ours (Payhawk) can help you get exactly that. You can track spend in real time, compare it against planned budgets, and catch overspending before it starts.

Abigail May, Finance Director at Biscuiteers, describes this like the following:

Something that we encounter often is first setting a plan for the month ahead of what we're going to manufacture and produce, and then landing a really big corporate order that knocks all that out of the park. A big order is great, but we've got a finite amount of capacity and capability in a month, so it’s important that we can quickly respond to having a big corporate order come and shift everything else. It’s important that we can use data dynamically to react quite as quickly to changes!

With full visibility into your plans, it’s much easier to move funds where they’re needed and stop overspend in its tracks with card controls, approval workflows, and spend policies that keep everyone on budget.

2. Disparate systems and processes

Multiple locations and branches can make for opaque financial visibility. Each of your locations might have its own processes for expense management, or perhaps they use different systems.
 
The problem? Disparate systems and processes lead to fragmented data, which means you can never access the full financial picture, making it impossible to make accurate financial decisions.

You need a solution that centralises your financial data, reconciles transactions in real time, connects easily to your ERP, and holds every cardholder accountable in order to stay in control. With us, you get all this, plus the flexibility to handle complex approval flows and unique organisational needs.

Clear financial separation is also key for companies with multiple business lines. At Payhawk, our multi-entity management features let you manage each entity’s finances individually while keeping a central view across the business. The result? Better compliance, cleaner reporting, and no more cross-entity budget confusion.

3. Missing expense receipts

How many times have you asked employees to provide receipt evidence of their purchases only to find out they’ve gone missing? This is a common problem for finance managers that gets worse when managing multiple entities.

Missing receipts can quickly lead to bigger problems, from lost VAT reclaim opportunities to inaccurate financial reporting, both of which can skew profit and loss statements and impact business growth.

With our popular mobile app, this risk evaporates quickly. Employees simply snap a photo of their receipt and click a button, and our OCR technology extracts all the necessary data automatically. AI-powered suggestions make the process even faster, like auto-creating supplier details, so there’s no need for manual entry.

At Payhawk, we automate your expense reports and reconciliation, helping you reclaim VAT, maintain accurate reporting, and forecast growth with confidence. Plus, with a direct integration with 60días, businesses can digitally capture receipts and reclaim VAT effortlessly within the required timeframe.

4. Employees using personal funds

Without corporate cards, employees need to rely on their personal funds to make business purchases and then rightly expect a prompt reimbursement.
 
There are two problems with the above approach. The first is that you're expecting employees to foot the bill. Secondly, you can't properly track company spend until after the expenses are submitted and reimbursed, leaving significant gaps in your data.
 
We provide corporate cards with built-in spending controls to eliminate the need for personal reimbursements. Finance teams can set individual limits, restrict certain merchants, and enable pre-approved spending categories, ensuring employees have the funds they need without risking policy violations. Plus, real-time tracking allows managers to oversee all transactions instantly, improving transparency and budget control.
 
Alejandro Álvarez is the Finance Director at coffee producer Cafe Candelas, a Payhawk customer. He describes life before Payhawk like this:

Before Payhawk, every time an employee needed company funds, they had to request from payroll in advance and then send a monthly expense report to reconcile everything. Since Payhawk, we've halved the time we spend on expense management. And we're going to save even more time thanks to the way we're constantly improving processes!
 
Removing the need to reimburse staff by introducing corporate cards makes all spend transparent. And using card controls means you set the spending boundaries, and employees have no choice but to stick to them, Alejandro says:
 
"We have consciously chosen to give our employees a debit card with a low limit. This allows them to make small expenses, such as a cup of coffee or lunch with a customer or supplier, but it prevents them from making expensive purchases. This limit ensures that the card cannot be misused."

A five-step guide to effective expense management in the food and beverage industry

Step 1: Conduct a comprehensive expense audit

By conducting an audit, you can start to identify problems within your current processes. You can uncover inaccuracies, errors and fraudulent activities (particularly if you perform your audit regularly). This auditing process helps you cut costs by making processes more efficient or identifying areas of overspending. It gives you the knowledge you need to start making better financial decisions.

Step 2: Implement a tailored expense management system

Your audit will shed light on your current processes, giving you the insight you need to make informed decisions about which expense management system you should implement. Finding a solution that helps you meet business goals is essential.
 
With many options on the market, you should start by researching feature options. Some features beneficial for the food and beverage industry include:

• A mobile app to upload expenses on the go. At Payhawk, our mobile app uses OCR technology, meaning your cardholder can take a picture of the receipt. We then auto-extract all the expense data and populate the expense submission. This ensures expense report accuracy and reduces fraudulent expense claims.
• Advanced card controls. You should use a solution complete with card controls to set spending limits, merchant restrictions, and more to monitor spend across your growing organisation closely. This will help you keep track of every penny spent while giving employees the freedom to spend within a framework (leading to improved policy compliance)
• Automated approval workflows. With so many departments spending money — manufacturing, distribution, marketing, sales, etc. — you need approval workflows in place that remove unnecessary manual tasks like signing off on spending. By building custom workflows, no request goes unnoticed, and spending is always signed off by the right people.
• Customisable expense categories. Being able to tag specific locations or projects can help you investigate spending at a more granular level. Financial visibility is king in the food and beverage industry, and using expense categories can help you achieve unparalleled segmentation and reporting capabilities.

Step 3: Streamline receipt and invoice management

Uploading receipts and matching invoices against receipts and goods received manually takes a lot of time. Use technology to unburden your finance management team by automating the entire process. At Payhawk, our three-way matching technology ensures that once an invoice is uploaded, our system automatically checks the amount against the receipt note and goods received and flags discrepancies above a certain threshold.
 
The above means you’re not paying an invoice with an incorrect amount or taking receipt of goods that don’t match your original order. Confidence in the tech you implement is key to streamlining these critical processes.
 
Manually reconciling corporate cards with ERP systems is time-consuming and prone to errors. Payhawk automates this process by syncing every card transaction in real time with your ERP, reducing manual data entry and ensuring accurate financial records. With OCR technology, expense reports are generated instantly, further accelerating reconciliation and financial closing cycles.

Step 4: Regularly review and adjust budgets

Budgets can't stay static for long in the food and beverage industry. With shifting consumer habits and market uncertainty, finance teams need more than just static spreadsheets.

That's where smarter budgeting comes in. Using a solution like ours means that finance teams can move beyond traditional spreadsheets and empower every budget owner to take real responsibility for their spending.

With real-time tracking across all spend types — including cards, invoices, purchase orders, and reimbursements — Payhawk Budgets gives team managers a live view of their progress against targets. No more waiting until month-end to spot overspending, and no more broken spreadsheets.

Plus, custom categories, flexible hierarchies, and multi-currency support make it easy to align budgets to specific departments, projects, and teams — so managers can spot variances early, adjust spend proactively, and stay firmly accountable for their share of the bottom line.

The result?

• Better decisions
• Stronger financial discipline
• And a finance team that stays strategic and agile even when the market changes

Interested in balancing project budgets? Watch the short video below or learn more about our budget tracking features.

Step 5: Access real-time financial insights

Getting access to real-time expense data gives you a clear advantage as a finance manager. You need the latest numbers at your fingertips to monitor spend accurately and forecast confidently. With our solution, you can track budget usage live, view detailed breakdowns by department, employee, or supplier, and automatically match card payments and invoices to budgets.

That means you can spot overspending quickly, stay on top of subscriptions, and keep ahead of upcoming spend, so funds are always where they need to be.

Dani Fornesa, CFO at international jamon business, Enrique Tomás, summarised this, like so:

Nowadays, we receive our reports based on what we have set in the platform. We analyse all the expenses much more efficiently than before, allowing us to identify what's incorrect quickly... Before Payhawk, we had to go manually through each ticket individually to run our checks.

Future spend management trends for food and beverage businesses

So, what's on the horizon for the food and beverage industry?

The shift towards cloud-based solutions

Cloud-based is a term rife in any industry. But cloud-management solutions like ours are becoming increasingly important for the food and beverage industry. Without access to financial data through the cloud, your organisation remains inflexible. You limit yourself to being able to only report on financial findings when based in the office or at a computer.

Cloud-based solutions empower all employees, wherever they’re working. Whether travelling to meet a supplier or build important connections at a local food market. They can upload expenses on the go, helping you keep track of all spending instantly and reconciling accounts. There’s no delay in decision-making either; you can log into your portal and see the state of spending across the organisation.

Integration of artificial intelligence in expense tracking

Making use of AI in expense management makes the workload lighter for your finance team. It reduces manual tasks and rids your processes of clumsy human errors, all while providing your organisation with more accurate expense reporting.

At Payhawk, we use AI in multiple ways, for example:

• OCR technology that automatically extracts data from receipts and invoices
• A Financial Controller AI Agent that works like a co-pilot to proactively deal with time-consuming things like chasing, approving, and analysing
• And machine learning that makes smart suggestions for expense categorisation based on previous entries

According to Dani at Enrique Tomás:

People embraced the change enthusiastically because everyone benefited in terms of efficiency and quality of life. In the end, they were spending hours on something that didn’t add value, like justifying a trip or a meal allowance. Now, they actually have more quality time to do what they do best, which is adding value to the company.

Sustainability practices impacting financial planning

With 62% of consumers willing to change their buying behaviours if it decreases their impact on the environment, it’s safe to say that measuring ESG has never been more important for companies. The food industry, in particular, faces serious pressure to reduce its impact on the environment.
 
Statistics from Trade Interchange report that food production and agriculture alone account for:

• 70% of global freshwater removal
• 26% of all global greenhouse gas emissions
• 78% of global ocean and freshwater eutrophication

At Payhawk, our ESG reporting features help companies track and report on CO2 by spending and Scope 3 emissions. We automatically calculate carbon emissions for every card transaction, giving you the insights you need to make informed decisions about reducing your impact on the environment.

Ready to take control of spend and scale smarter?

The food and beverage industry doesn’t wait — and neither should your finance function.

Learn how leading food and drink brands are using real-time visibility, AI automation, and advanced controls to cut waste, boost efficiency, and stay ahead.