Connected systems, better decisions: How to get multi-entity spend visibility across your business

When your entities operate in silos, it's impossible to get a clear picture. Each team uses different tools. Payments happen through different banks. Reporting looks different from country to country. It slows everything down. Worse, it stops you from spotting risk, controlling spend, and making smart decisions.

You can’t manage what you can’t see

Good spend visibility across entities changes that. It gives your finance team the clarity to act with confidence, speed, and control. When you connect your systems – corporate cards, expense management, ERP, HRIS, and more – you gain a single source of truth. And when you replicate that across entities it allows you to collect data from all entities in one place, helping you uncover spend patterns otherwise hidden in local silos. You can:

• Get spend visibility across entities
• Track spend across subsidiaries in real time
• Monitor budgets by entity and group
• Sync tax codes, suppliers, and employees automatically
• See which teams need support or intervention
• Cut down on manual reconciliation
• Spot duplicate or fraudulent spend early
• Close books faster and with less effort
• Focus more time on planning, less on fixing

It’s about enabling smarter decisions

Think of finance as a control tower. If you don't have visibility, you can't land the planes. But when you can see your data clearly, everything lands seamlessly where it should.

Make sure your multi-entity finance management solution helps you do these five important things for a start:

1. Make faster, better investment decisions
2. Understand performance across regions
3. Allocate funds where they'll make the biggest impact
4. Catch issues before they snowball into losses
5. Build trust with your board through data-driven reporting

Make sure your solution offers real-time visibility, auto-reconciliation, and seamless integrations with your (ERP NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Xero, etc) to help you stop your 'planes from circling' and take you from number crunching to a value-adding, strategic partner.

Andrew Jacobi, VP of US Finance at State of Play Hospitality, describes how the right solution and the visibility it created helped their team make decisions about spend easily, saying:

We get complete spend visibility thanks to Payhawk's integration with NetSuite. That flow of spend data means we can understand our P&L very quickly after we produce it, with no headaches.

Control spend across entities, currencies, and teams

Back to the plane analogy: Managing global spend shouldn't feel like operating the control tower on a foggy day. At Payhawk, our Group Dashboard gives you a clear, real-time view of expenses, budgets, and team activity across all your entities — no blind spots, no spreadsheet turbulence.

You can monitor reimbursements, card payments, and invoices by region, department, or cost type. Spot your biggest spenders, act on low balances, and manage liquidity planning proactively — whether you're dealing in euros, pounds, or dollars.

You can also define what counts as an expense at the group level and roll that out globally via workflows and policies built right into the system where your cardholders spend. That means no more chasing rogue formats or missing data — just clean, compliant, consistent inputs that make reporting a breeze.

Serkan Yüksel, Lead of Digital Transformation Finance at Hypoport SE, says, "We can now manage liquidity planning more efficiently and accurately through the dashboard and take better control by segmenting data by subsidiaries, teams, and cost types."

Local nuance, global control

Managing multiple entities means dealing with local tax rules, payment formats, currencies, and languages. And yes, that gets complex fast.

But the right platform can handle all this without making your life harder.

At Payhawk, we support local payment methods and currency options, offer local-language interfaces, and even let you tailor corporate card controls or workflows by entity. But it's all under one roof. You get the global control you need with the local nuance your teams rely on.

Robbie Hadfield, ACCA, Senior Director of Solution Engineering at Payhawk, says:

For companies that want to protect and segregate entities for legal purposes, our platform keeps operational businesses separate from central headquarters, minimising potential legal liabilities. Our integrations with solutions like NetSuite help companies scale efficiently and control costs, e.g. ensuring that HQ costs can be charged to operational entities for streamlined financial management.

Enforce global spend policies — with the help of AI

It's one thing to set a global expense policy and another thing entirely to get your teams in six countries to follow it. That's where our Financial Controller Agent comes in.

At Payhawk, our AI-powered agents work across your entire entity structure, chasing receipts, approvals, and missing data — all via natural conversations in Slack, Teams, or on the Payhawk platform. And they don't just remind people; they understand policies, fill in blanks, and flag anomalies.

For multi-entity businesses, that means less time playing detective across offices or even countries and more time trusting that you're applying policies consistently while barely lifting a finger, whether the spend comes from Berlin, Barcelona, or Boston.

Use AI power to get your month-end under control — for good

Closing the books across entities used to take weeks. Now? It’s just a few days. At Payhawk, we make sure you don’t have to wait until month-end to spot what’s missing. Our AI auto-chases receipts, supports spend analysis, flags policy breaches, and suggests corrective actions so you stay up to date without any gaps.

You can apply standardised workflows by default to keep things efficient or tailor them by entity where needed. Plus, you can route approvals and payments differently based on how each team works without losing your central oversight.

Do you have entities trading with each other? Our setup eliminates messy intercompany loans and reconciliations. You get clean books, faster closes, and happier auditors.

And with our Group Employee Module, onboarding is just as efficient. Add employees across multiple entities in one go, appoint approvers, and manage team structures from a single interface.

Together, all of this means faster month-end closes, fewer manual corrections, and better compliance across every business unit.

From vision to reality

Companies like international jewellery brand Astrid & Miyu have already made the switch.

And the results? 40+ hours freed up each week. Expenses processed 66% faster — full multi-currency support, without fragmentation.

Stephen Wilkinson, Finance and Operations Director at Astrid & Miyu, explains:

Payhawk's multi-entity management and multi-currency support is particularly critical for a business managing operations across four countries. Previously, country-specific platforms or card providers made cost tracking fragmented and cumbersome. But with Payhawk, these challenges disappeared!

Finance leaders at growing companies often tell us the same thing: they wish they'd made the change sooner. The right platform pays for itself in time saved, risk avoided, and growth unlocked.

Visibility isn't a nice to have — it's a necessity. For finance teams, spending visibility across entities leads to faster month-end, fewer surprises, and more time for strategy. Want to try it for yourself?

Book a personalised demo to see how Payhawk could support growth and visibility at your entity business.