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)
Properly managing company spending is key to staying in control and supporting growth, especially when juggling multiple entities or global operations. Learn how the right platform can help you streamline processes and keep track of your spending more easily, from the difference between spend management and expense management to an overview of the best options on the market.
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Controlling company spend touches every part of your organisation. From supplier management and procurement to project ROI and IT, as CFO, it's your job to ensure every penny aligns with your wider company goals.
When it comes to managing spend and budgets across your organisation, especially with international entities in the mix, spreadsheets won't cut it. But with so many tools out there, it's hard to know where to begin. Find out how to take a step back, figure out what you really need, and see which platform will give you the clarity you need for better, more strategic decision-making.
Ever wondered why you keep hearing both expense management and spend management thrown around?
Spend management is the big picture. It covers everything from centralising spend data and analysing trends to procurement, supplier management, and controlling expenses.
Expense management, on the other hand, focuses only on employee expenses, such as travel, meals, and reimbursements. It’s a key part of spend control and financial visibility, but it’s just one piece of the wider spend management puzzle.
Only 35% of CFOs believe their current tech stack meets their needs, so before diving headfirst into another poorly fitting solution, investigate what features will add true value to your organisation.
You need to confidently track expenses, reimburse promptly when required, issue virtual or physical corporate cards quickly, and build custom approval workflows to reduce the risk of unnecessary and fraudulent spending.
And to do all of that, you need a joined-up card and expense management solution.
Do you want spend visibility? Agility? And control? You must ensure you can integrate your current tech stack with your chosen spend management solution. Look for a spend management platform that effortlessly supports ERP, accounting, and HR integrations to ensure you centralise your spend data, eliminate duplication, avoid fraud, and reduce manual data entry.
NB: Some platforms support custom API development, too, meaning you can integrate any key tech you use (check if you need this and if your chosen option can meet your requirements).
Think about all the people who have to use your platform: Finance managers, cardholders, department heads... pretty much everyone in your organisation. Now, think about training them to adopt a new piece of software.
Here, you need a spend management system with a user-friendly interface and an intuitive mobile app. Check G2 for reviews and ratings from non-finance and finance professionals alike.
Tracking budgets in real time is essential for any scaling organisation. Consider a spend management solution that gives you visibility over budget utilisation across all your spend categories across all your entities.
Make sure you’ll be able to effortlessly track subscriptions, invoices, purchase orders, and employee reimbursements.
Managing multi-entity spend across different systems can quickly create a perfect storm of inefficiencies: Fragmented data, duplicated work, and limited visibility. Tracking spend accurately becomes harder, manual tasks multiply, and intercompany transactions can turn into a logistical headache. From sharing invoices between entities to handling internal trading, the complexity quickly piles up.
Look for a solution that offers centralised control and a single source of truth. With the right structure in place, you can eliminate data silos, reduce manual work, and get full visibility across all entities without constant back-and-forth.
Centralising all purchase requests to gain visibility over upcoming spend puts your organisation in a powerful position to make accurate budgeting and forecasting decisions. That’s why you need access to smart procure-to-pay features to automate workflows, match invoices with purchase orders and receipts and close your books quickly.
Automating your accounts payable will make invoice processing faster, more accurate, and much easier to manage. The right spend management solution can take things a step further — using OCR technology to extract invoice data, setting up automatic approval workflows, and reducing the risk of late payments. It’s a smart way to improve control, cut out manual errors, and keep your supplier relationships on track.
While spend management is generally manageable with basic tools, when just a handful of employees spend money for work, growing businesses quickly outgrow fragmented systems.
You need a platform that evolves alongside your company, regardless of what that growth looks like. Whether expanding your headcount, managing relationships with more suppliers, creating customised workflows for different departments, or launching into new markets with additional legal entities, a scalable spend management solution becomes essential.
The right platform helps navigate these scaling challenges, from streamlining employee onboarding and enforcing consistent spend policies to automating accounts payable and
providing unified visibility across your entire organisation.
When evaluating solutions, consider not just your current needs, but where your business will be in three to five years to avoid outgrowing your spend management infrastructure.
Every business is different. That’s why customisable spend management is essential.
Use a solution that lets you build your approval workflows to suit your specific organisational structure, set individual or team limits, restrict when employees can spend and where, assign budget owners, import external data, e.g., Xero, or create custom expense fields, including cost centre, project ID, and department.
You want to know that the spend management solution you choose can confidently cater for your industry and the niche spend management challenges it faces. Let’s say you’re in transport and logistics: Will your chosen solution be able to handle cross-country receipts from your drivers? Or, if you carry out projects for clients, can you recreate your cost centre setup and project-based spend controls?
Choosing the right spend management platform involves connecting the dots across your financial operations — tracking real-time spend, managing multiple entities, integrating with your existing systems, and giving every user a seamless experience.
So, to truly future-proof your finance function, look for a platform that leverages AI and automation across the board. From smart OCR capture to fully customisable workflows and predictive insights, these days, you can expect advanced AI agents to handle your routine approvals, flag anomalies, and execute complex tasks autonomously. That means fewer manual processes, fewer errors, and faster decisions, so you and your team can focus on strategy, not admin.
Too many spend management tools to choose from? With so many platforms promising visibility, control, and automation, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
Here's a quick rundown of ten popular platforms to help you compare what’s out there and consider which is the best fit for you.
Let’s start with our solution. It’s comprehensive, ticks all the feature boxes above, and many organisations worldwide trust us to provide complete global spend management.
Javier Gorena, CFO at Rentals United, says:
Yes, other tools can manage expenses, but nobody does it like Payhawk. With other spend management solutions, I felt blind about expenses, but Payhawk gives me all the control and visibility I need to make the best decisions.
Our spend management solution in a nutshell:
Airbase offers customers various useful tools to help them manage business spend:
If you’re looking for a platform to manage your spend and travel arrangements in one platform, Expensify is worth considering:
Spendesk offers a procurement and spend management platform.
Tipalti helps customers onboard vendors quickly and streamlines approval workflows and purchase orders under one roof.
Brex can help empower your employees while gaining real-time spend control over global spending.
Ramp’s comprehensive spend management solution includes:
Control your finances and manage travel with Zoho Expense to do the following:
BILL offers customers a complete spend management solution and a free standalone expense management option, which is perfect for those with smaller budgets.
Coupa spend management is AI-driven and helps organisations maximise operational efficiency:
Adopting a new tool takes time, effort, and buy-in. Here are some of the most important things to factor in before onboarding a new solution.
Before you start implementing the new software, involve employees in auditing current processes and understanding where best to make improvements. After all, people of all levels will use your spend management solution, so it's key that you consider their opinions.
It can be tempting to dive straight into your new tool, but make sure everyone prepares for spend management change and knows how to navigate the software. To make the transition as easy as possible, use a solution that offers exceptional customer support and an in-depth help guide section.
Spend management software isn't a plug-and-play, leave-it solution. It's important to measure your return on investment and make tweaks to ensure you're making the most of your new spend management solution.
The solutions on the market nowadays come installed with a ton of smart features that, once implemented, can save you time and money, increase efficiencies, improve accuracy in financial reporting and more. It's worth learning how to get the most out of the tool, which means partnering with a solution that helps support you on your journey.
Martin Reindl, Director of Implementation at Payhawk, says the following about implementation and ROI with Payhawk:
With expert support, fast setup, and zero manual data entry, our customers see ROI in just ten months, well ahead of the industry average!
Explore Payhawk’s spend management solution with a personalised product demo. Request a demo today.
The Payhawk Editorial Team consists seasoned finance professionals boasting years of experience in spend management, digital transformation, and the finance profession. We're dedicated to delivering insightful content to empower your financial journey.
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Whether you have tens, hundreds, or thousands of employees, we’re making your business spend work for you, giving you control over spending at scale with a single solution. Say goodbye to tedious finance tasks, schedule a demo with us today.
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