Group CFO? Get the complete guide to multi-entity spend control (feat' top CFO insights)
Group CFO? Get the complete guide to multi-entity spend control (feat' top CFO insights)
Nearly 40% of CFOs don't fully trust their company's financial data. That's a serious red flag. How can you make confident decisions if you can't rely on your numbers? To fix it, you need finance processes that are not just efficient, but also transparent and tightly controlled. Find out how to rethink the ways you track, manage, and audit your spend to achieve accurate data (and see what to do with it).
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It's a tough one, but do you know how much time and money you're wasting by not using your resources properly? It's a ripple effect that affects everything — profitability, morale, operating costs, and beyond.
From accounts payable and expense management to budgeting and planning, all your processes stand to gain from optimisation. And the fastest way to do that? Automation. Cut the repetitive tasks. Free your team from the grind of manual entry. Replace messy workflows and siloed tools with clean, centralised data and tech that actually talk to each other.
There are so many benefits to process optimisation, from real-time data access and improving cash flow management to reducing costs and streamlining workflows. Here are the five biggest benefits of optimising your financial processes:
Workflows get complex, especially as you grow and have more and more entities to manage. More people to manage means more processes and tools, and suddenly double the work for your finance teams.
To keep on top of all your company spend, you need to optimise your workflow management process by automating and customising approval workflows. With our Workflow Designer, for example, you can build workflows to suit individual team and business needs.
By customising and digitising your approval workflows, you ensure the right people manage spend, you cap unnecessary expenses, banish approval bottlenecks, and process everything efficiently and without error.
The longer it takes to complete a task, the more money it costs in resource allocation.
Time is a valuable commodity, so wasting it is bad for business. Manual processes drain resources; that's a fact. It's time to shift up a gear and embrace tech to reduce the costs associated with manual financial processes.
You can also reduce costs associated with employee fraud (from manual expense management) and overspending, such as paying for duplicate or underused subscriptions.
There are plenty of other hidden costs you could control with expense management software like Payhawk. Let the tech spot duplication and help you identify ways to cut costs and further optimise operations.
If you're not managing your cash flow effectively, you're at risk — funds could be leaking without you realising it. Small expenses add up fast, especially when multiple employees are spending.
That's why at Payhawk, our real-time budget utilisation and reconciliation give unmatched spend visibility, which is essential for any business wanting to improve its cash flow and accounts payable processes.
And, if you take advantage of Payhawk company cards/plug your corporate cards into Payhawk, you can boost accountability and automatically enforce compliant spending, too, just like at Mercell:
Before Payhawk, we only had one credit card, which was used by several people, so it was difficult for us to trace which expenses were coming from where. Every time someone needed to use the credit card, they needed to reach out to our CFO, and now they get the autonomy they need.
Still relying on manual data entry? That's what's slowing you down. If there's a delay in accessing financial data, there's a delay in reporting. And nine times out of ten, manual processes are to blame.
You need real-time, accurate data to make smart decisions, like reallocating funds or adjusting budgets. That starts with eliminating manual expense entry.
That's where OCR comes in. At Payhawk, our mobile app uses built-in Optical Character Recognition and our own AI to do the heavy lifting for you.
Snap a photo of a receipt, and boom — your report fills itself in. The app extracts key details like date, amount, and category, so you don't have to. All that's left is a quick review.
No more guesswork, no more errors. Just fast, accurate data that powers confident financial decisions and impresses your stakeholders.
To make financial decisions and generally drive the organisation forward, you need a complete picture of the company's financial health. But financial data sets can often be siloed, whether stored in disparate systems or kept under lock and key by different departments, leading to poor inter-departmental communication.
In fact, reliance on spreadsheets and disparate systems causes nearly 40% of CFOs to lose trust in their organisation's financial data.
But optimising your financial processes helps free this siloed data and improve collaboration.
Our integrations with market-leading business systems like QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 allow for seamless data sharing across systems and departments, ensuring that every team member has access to the up-to-date financial information they need to do their jobs effectively.
Watch: See our direct integration with NetSuite in action and hear why it became such a game-changer for State of Play Hospitality below.
State of Play Hospitality, a multi-venue leisure company with operations across the UK and US, needed a better way to manage finance across entities. Before switching to us, their setup was fragmented, relying on manual processes and disconnected tools like credit cards and Bill.com.
After switching in July 2022, the team streamlined expense management, gained real-time visibility, and easily connected all spending to NetSuite. Venue managers now control their own budgets, categorise spend accurately, and act faster with instant cards and automated workflows, achieving a far superior business efficiency.
Andrew Jacobi, VP of US Finance at State of Play Hospitality, describes:
We give Payhawk to our venue managers so they can track spend against budget in real time and stay on top of each GL category. At the end of the period, we check budget variances — like spotting we spent $7,000 on DJs instead of the planned $5,000 — and use those insights to adjust for next time.
By switching to us, State of Play Hospitality brought structure, speed, and visibility to its finance operations: No more guesswork, just smart, scalable spend management that can keep up with its growth.
David Watson, Group Financial Controller at State of Play Hospitality:
[Since switching to Payhawk], we have saved time and made better decisions, thanks to complete visibility over our multi-entity spend.
By optimising your financial processes, you can enjoy greater efficiencies business-wide, make significant cost savings, and improve cash flow management.
Unfortunately, your processes won't optimise themselves, but if you're looking for an expense management software that can transform every inch of your financial processes (so much so that you'll wonder how you've been coping with your old ways for so long), then schedule a free Payhawk demo and let us show you what you've been missing.
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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