How to take charge of project spend: A guide to financial control

True spend control empowers any person managing project expenses. There are so many expenses you have to track, reimburse, and reconcile throughout the duration of your project. With multiple members of staff and the challenges of scope creep, budget overruns, and manually tracking project expenses, it can be a major headache.

Here, we’re exploring what project spend management includes and how you can finally tackle, track and measure project spend.

What is project spend management?

Project spend management is really about one thing: Making sure your projects stay on budget and every penny is accounted for. You plan, track, and control spend across each project, so there are no surprises, no waste, and more opportunities to save. Plus, when you’ve got clear spend data, it’s easier to prove ROI and bill clients accurately without the guesswork or back-and-forth.

The benefits go way beyond cost. You’ll make better decisions, boost productivity, and keep stakeholders happier, too. In fact, 73% of organisations that use formal project budgeting say they consistently hit their project goals.

Five challenges of project spend management

Whether it's you, your finance manager, or a project accountant, managing project spend comes with its fair share of challenges. Here are five common ones — and how to tackle them head-on:

1. Overspending

Overspending on the predefined budget is common in project financial management. But what causes the budget to overrun? Scope creep, poor resource planning and allocation, inadequate tracking of project expenses, and manual budget allocation can all contribute to project budget overruns.

The solution:
Flesh out the scope in full before the project starts. Work closely with your operations manager to get everyone involved in the project at an early stage to mitigate any unforeseen costs. Track project expenses automatically with expense management software, assign budgets, and manage everything digitally without manual calculations, allocations, or reconciliations.

2. Complex expense allocation

Allocating spend to the right project can be a major challenge, especially when you're juggling multiple initiatives at once. Even a single big project can involve a tangle of smaller expenses that you must categorise accurately. Without the right system in place, it will be a minefield for you and your team.

The solution:
Find software that first helps you digitally manage spend and automatically extract data from receipts and invoices. Make sure it also lets you easily track and monitor spend using custom expense categories. This way, you don't need to rely on manual receipt collection or manual data entry.

At the arts and fabrication company, MDM Props Ltd, they use custom fields to easily code and track their expenses. Finance Manager Uchenna says:

With Payhawk, we can categorise our spend by project using custom fields, so it's super easy to see what's being spent and why. Each cardholder codes up the job themselves to see where their costs are going; this is important because it keeps all the information in one place and pulls all the project budget spend info together to see what we can improve. Also, we now have the time to proactively do project analysis because we're no longer chasing receipts!

3. No real-time visibility

If you manually assign expenses to different projects, you’re opening yourself up to potential data integrity issues — from wrong or duplicate suppliers to incorrect categorisation, and more. These issues can quickly escalate and significantly impact the accuracy of your financial reporting.

The solution:
Choose a system with company cards, fast expense reconciliation, and real-time budget tracking. Make sure it lets you adjust budgets on the go and clearly shows current and upcoming spending.

4. Expense approval delays

Delays in expense approvals halt project progress because your employees can't access the resources they need quickly enough. Delays also mean you can't reimburse employees when required or accurately track expenses, and it becomes difficult to forecast and report on project budgets.

The solution:
Implement an expense tracking system that allows you to create custom spend approval workflows that work perfectly with both physical and virtual corporate cards. This solution means employees are spending company funds (so there’s no need for reimbursements).

Take the example from the Marketing & Creative Agency, PinPoint Media. Daniel Tang, Finance Manager, says:

We have a company expenses policy, and with Payhawk, we ensure everyone adheres to the rules and guidelines internally using the approval systems in place. Payhawk’s workflow designer has improved the overall ease of use by being very intuitive and has improved the customisation functionality, too, as we can modify the workflows depending on the project department.

5. Inefficient reporting

Stakeholders will want to know how the budget is looking throughout the project. However, generating accurate reports on project expenses and financial status can be time-consuming and prone to errors, making the entire process inefficient and ineffective.

The solution:
You need streamlined reporting processes, from automatically capturing expenses and processing them to accessing real-time reporting and analytics features to make tracking budgets a breeze.

The benefits of effective financial control in project management

Clear and robust financial control isn't just a nice-to-have — it's what sets successful projects apart. Here are five ways it can work for you:

• Boost your bottom line: If you track spend in real time and keep a lid on unnecessary costs, you can improve your margins. That means better ROI and healthier profits.
• Keep stakeholders in the loop: Accurate, up-to-date figures mean you can confidently report on progress and performance without second-guessing or scrambling for answers.
• Encourage smarter spending: Use clear policies built into your card and expense management (with a solution like ours) and make it easy for employees to stick to the rules. Everyone stays on budget with no nasty surprises.
• Make faster, better decisions: With the right data at your fingertips, you can budget more effectively, adjust plans when needed, and scale confidently.
• Spot issues early: Stay in control from day one so you can catch overspending risks early and plan for them instead of scrambling to fix them later.

How to achieve project financial control

Managing project spend can feel almost impossible, especially when you’re juggling budgets, timelines, and multiple stakeholders. But with the right tools and processes in place, getting complete financial control isn’t just possible — it’s powerful.

Here are the eight key steps you need to help you plan, track, and optimise your project finances from start to finish.

Make sure financial planning is a priority

To achieve complete financial control over your project, you must prioritise financial planning from day one. That means establishing a comprehensive budget per project. If you don't do this, your budget can easily overrun, costs become impossible to track, and stakeholders can lose confidence in the project.

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

Monitor and control all project costs

Use a system that supports real-time visibility to help you better control project costs and make proactive, informed decisions about the project.

We know outcomes can change throughout the project, so having real-time visibility over all expenses and real-time reconciliation keeps you agile and flexible when reacting to these changes.

Manage risk proactively

Risks include unauthorised or out-of-policy spend, fraudulent expense claims, and budget overruns. Implement a handful of simple measures to manage these risks effectively, including single-use cards or cards with highly customisable card controls (like capping spending limits, auto-blocking, setting specific merchant controls, and more).

These measures help you protect company funds while allowing staff to spend within a predefined framework.

Leverage data analytics for better decision-making

Getting access to granular data can drive better decision-making. What kind of data should you look to access? At Payhawk, our unlimited budget dimensions, you can access a very detailed breakdown of how your budget is tracking, where, and who is spending the most. You can also use expense filters and custom categories to delve deeper into project spending.

Being able to easily filter your data makes managing your project spend reactive and proactive. You can make accurate decisions about where to reallocate the project budget immediately.

Extra tip: With our multi-entity management features, you can see the costs even when the project management team has employees from different entities, keeping all project spend unified.

Remove the need for manual tracking

To manage your project finances, you need to ditch manual tracking. It's time-consuming and prone to errors, and it can lead to overspending, missed milestones, and unnecessary costs.

With the right spend management system, you can automate the entire process, giving you accurate data, real-time visibility, and one less thing to worry about.

Take this example:

Let’s say you raise a purchase order request, and it’s accepted, but the details don’t quite match the receipt notes when the goods arrive. These details can be easily overlooked by the human eye, but technology? Not a chance.

At Payhawk, our three-way matching system automatically checks for discrepancies, including the invoice, the purchase order, and the receipt notes, to ensure that the goods received and the invoice amount are correct before you pay out.

Another great example of automatic tracking? Meet our OCR. OCR stands for optical character recognition and is essential to help employees file their expense reports quickly and without error.

Here’s how it works: Employees are out purchasing much-needed project supplies. They make the purchase and snap a photo of their receipt. The OCR tech kicks in, scans the receipt, and extracts all necessary information to process the expense (date, expense details, tax rates, etc.).

This approach cuts down on fraudulent expense claims and keeps the expense management process smooth and error-free.

Nadia Vanuytrecht, HR & Operations Manager at Explose Agency, describes it like this:

The OCR does part of my job by identifying duplicate invoices and populating the fields, so it’s like the four-eyes principle in action: a real time saver!

Eliminate approval delays with custom workflows

Approval delays can slow down your projects, but they don’t have to. With smart, custom workflows, you can route expense requests automatically based on the type of spend, team, or project.

You can set up automatic approvals for smaller expenses — say, anything under £500 — so they don’t need sign-off. Then, for higher amounts, like £500–£1000, you can route them straight to your finance manager. They’ll get an instant alert and can quickly approve, decline, or request more details. It’s a faster, smarter way to keep spend moving while staying in control.

No matter your project's complexity, you can build a workflow that fits with the right triggers, spend limits, and approvers so that every expense follows your policy without slowing you down.

Integrate your tech stack for complete project financial visibility

Nothing is worse than manually syncing data from your expense management software to your accounting system. At Payhawk, we support all kinds of market-leading integrations to help you lessen the administrative burden that having separate systems can cause.

When managing project spend, you want to ensure that all expenses are reconciled in real time with your accounting system, that it tracks all unpaid and paid expenses, and that it seamlessly synchronises all accounting codes.

Assign team cards to separate project spend

Managing project spend on top of everyday expenses can get messy. That's why you need a simple way to keep things separate and stay in control. With our team cards, you can assign shared budgets to specific team members (either by linking their existing corporate card or issuing a new one under the project). It's an easy way to track project spend without it getting lost in the day-to-day.

Getting full financial control might seem out of reach, but with the right tools, it’s absolutely doable. When you can customise spend limits and see every detail of your budget in real time, making smart, informed decisions gets a whole lot easier.

Ready to control your project spending like never before? Request a demo to see how granular you can get with project data and budgets.