Business travel is broken for finance: Here’s why

If you’re a CFO or Finance Director, booking travel isn’t your biggest problem. Instead, it’s that travel expense visibility is breaking because booking systems and payment systems don’t connect, and finance enters the process too late to influence the decision.

Picture this. Your top sales rep, Ben, is flying to Paris to attend a major conference with some of his team. He’s thinking about his pitch, his passport, and whether he’ll make his connection. He’s not thinking about your travel policy or budget thresholds.

Three weeks later, you’re reviewing spend.

You discover that Ben and his two teammates all booked last-minute out-of-policy flights. The filters existed. But they were easy to bypass. The overspend? Five thousand dollars.

Now, multiply that across regions, departments, and quarters. This isn’t a one-off mistake; it’s a structural pattern.

This is a familiar story, and in fact one that Payhawk’s Product Manager for Business Travel, Boris Angelov (aka Bobby), heard at an event last month.

Recently, we sat down with Bobby and Karolina (Payhawk’s Product Marketing Manager for Business Travel) to discuss why, when it comes to business travel management, most organisations don’t struggle with ‘bookings’; they struggle with control.

The invisible moment where control breaks

In most companies, travel tools are designed for booking first and finance second. And that’s a major structural flaw.

Bobby describes:

Usually, the [overspend] failure happens the second the book button is pressed without a pre-approved request or a budget check or policy checks.

The decision is made, the commitment is locked in, and finance isn’t involved.

From there, the system becomes reactive.

“It’s too late now,” Bobby says. “Finance only sees the ghost of the transaction in the form of a credit card line item weeks later.”

Weeks later, there’s nothing left to prevent — only something to reconcile.

Booking systems and payment systems operate separately. Context gets lost between them. Finance is left trying to reconstruct the story behind a charge long after the moment that mattered.

That disconnect is where control leaks.

Policies don’t fail, enforcement does

Every business has a travel policy. The question is whether it actually shapes behaviour.

Too often, policy lives in a PDF or a buried intranet page. Employees skim it once, then forget it exists.

As Bobby puts it:

If your policy is just a document, it’s really just a suggestion.

Leakage doesn’t happen because employees are careless. It happens because the guardrails aren’t embedded in the decision itself.

When enforcement happens after booking, finance becomes the compliance function. That’s inefficient. It creates friction. It shifts the conversation from prevention to justification.

Effective control doesn’t rely on chasing exceptions. It prevents them at the point of intent.

Travel is uniquely fragmented

Travel is harder to manage than most spend categories because it’s inherently fragmented.

A SaaS subscription usually means one vendor and one invoice. But travel doesn’t work that way.

“In travel, a single trip can generate five different receipts across three different weeks,” Karolina describes.

Flights, hotels, transfers, and meals involve different vendors and payment timelines.

If those transactions aren’t automatically grouped, finance has to manually connect them.

One finance team told us they spend two full days every month matching flight invoices from a travel agency to credit card lines in their bank statement.

Bobby’s response:

They weren’t doing finance. They were doing data entry because their systems fundamentally didn’t talk to each other.

And that’s not a talent issue, it’s a major system design issue.

When tools don’t communicate, people compensate or work around. And that compensation shows up as manual, time-draining work.

Manual control doesn’t scale

Many companies rely on traditional travel agencies or internal travel managers to maintain oversight.

At a small scale, this works.

“When you have fifty employees, you might have a travel manager who can catch mistakes. When you have five hundred, that manager becomes a bottleneck.”

As organisations grow, exceptions multiply. Manual overrides increase. Approvals slow down. Employees bypass controls because speed matters more than policy.

Eventually, more headcount is added just to maintain visibility.

Spend control that depends solely on human oversight becomes fragile at scale. The more complex the organisation, the harder it is to maintain consistency.

Watch the full video interview below.

The hidden cost of missing context

When a transaction looks questionable, finance starts investigating.

• Who approved it?
• Why was it over policy?
• Was it linked to revenue activity?

“The killer isn’t the cost of the flight,” Bobby says. “It’s the cost of the time spent figuring out who approved it and why.”

The investigation becomes more expensive than the ticket difference. And that cost rarely appears in reporting dashboards.

Missing context forces finance into a reactive posture. It reduces strategic capacity. It shifts attention from forecasting and analysis to reconciliation and explanation.

As Karolina affirms: “That’s the real inefficiency!”

Travel isn’t a separate category. It’s just spend.

Historically, business travel has been treated as its own ecosystem. Separate tools. Separate approvals. Separate reporting.

But from a financial perspective, a flight to Paris is no different from a software licence or marketing invoice. It’s capital leaving the organisation.

It should follow the same standards of control, visibility, and audit integrity as every other category.

Yet in many companies, travel sits outside the core spend architecture. That’s why it feels chaotic.

Not because travel is inherently broken or difficult, but because finance only sees it after commitment.

The structural pattern

Zoom out, and the pattern becomes clear:

1. Booking decisions happen without finance visibility.
2. Policy isn’t enforced at the moment of intent.
3. Payment and booking data remain disconnected.
4. Context disappears between systems.
5. Finance reacts instead of orchestrating.

The issue isn’t travellers; it’s your internal architecture — or lack of one.

As Bobby explains:

Until travel is treated as spend from the very first click, finance will continue cleaning up after it! And that’s not where modern finance teams create value.

The breakthrough isn’t a tighter policy or more approvals. It’s structural. If finance only enters the process after booking, you’ve already lost leverage. Control has to begin when someone searches, selects, and commits.

That means embedding budget visibility and policy enforcement directly into the booking flow and automatically linking every booking to its payment and ERP records. When those pieces connect, finance moves from chasing context to orchestrating spend.

Your next step: Review your current travel flow from request to ERP entry and identify where visibility disappears. That’s where control starts leaking.

See how Payhawk’s AI Travel Agent and built-in policies embed policy compliance, budget context, and visibility at the moment of intent, not weeks later.

Or book a personalised demo with one of our in-house experts to experience how connected travel spend actually works.