Beyond chaos: Structured data access controls for secure expense management

Spend controls and approvals should be tight, not suffocating. Finance orchestration with the right roles and permissions keeps teams compliant and efficient, without the data leaks, bottlenecks, or shadow access that slow business down.

When spending rights and data visibility are too broad, you risk exposure, non-compliance, and wasted hours fixing mistakes. When they’re too restrictive, operations grind to a halt. Finance teams turn into blockers, with HR, project managers, and others queuing for data — or worse, sharing credentials to get work done.

The fix is smarter finance orchestration. With Payhawk, you can tailor roles to match how your organization actually works. A finance manager might need entity-wide control, while a local approver only signs off spend in their department. Combine that with granular permissions and visibility rules, and you’ve got a secure system that scales smoothly as you grow.
Learn how to tackle six of the most common finance operations challenges — without micromanaging every expense.

The challenge: Trying to separate roles across legal entities or countries

One-size-fits-all roles break fast in finance. Global teams deal with multiple entities, currencies, and VAT or sales tax rules, so generic roles and quick fixes within workflows only take you so far. As your organization grows, duties become more specialized, and you need granular access to keep operations running securely.

With Payhawk, you can customize permissions to align with each user’s responsibilities. That way, you build a compliant approval structure, reduce risk, and give teams the access they need — without unnecessary workarounds.

The solution:

• Entity-specific roles and extensions. Effortlessly create the exact roles and permission structure your company needs, with unlimited combinations across multiple entities. Let’s say you invite an employee to more than one entity; you can assign different roles for the same person in each entity. E.g., a finance manager in one, a local approver in another.
• Cross-entity control with central oversight. Not only can you control spend across all entities, but you can also gain real-time spend visibility through a centralized dashboard.
• “Super admin” roles. These roles can control changes to critical reference data (e.g., vendors, categories, cost centers), which prevents duplicates, misclassifications, and audit risks. Being a “super admin” is the only role with all permissions.

The challenge: Stopping random people approving spend

Approvals need structure, not improvisation. When team members jump into workflows “to help,” or junior employees approve their reimbursements, mistakes and out-of-policy spending creep in. Soon, tracking and controlling expenses becomes impossible.

Clear accountability fixes this. It cuts risk, strengthens compliance, and gives everyone better visibility. With the right spend management solution, you can enforce structured approval chains that keep spending under control — without slowing teams down.

The solution:

• Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) for spending. RBAC defines who — based on job role — has authority to approve what. For example, approval rights can sit with employees, team leads, budget managers, or administrators, ensuring oversight matches your organizational structure.
• Segregation of duties across technical and financial roles. Risk multiplies when the same person can submit, approve, and reconcile spend. That’s why finance and technical responsibilities must stay separate. Finance managers, controllers, and administrators get specialised roles tied to compliance and reconciliation. Project managers, HR, or engineers get access only to the functions they need — like submitting expenses or viewing reports. The result is no overlap, no shared credentials, and clean, auditable workflows.

The challenge: I want department heads to control their team budgets

Nothing good comes from completely centralizing your approvals. If you do this, you’ll deal with bottlenecks, delayed reimbursements and halting business operations — not to mention burnt-out finance teams.

But with the right spend management solution, department heads can easily control team budgets. By empowering these managers and letting them take responsibility for their own cost centers, you’re also reducing the load on your finance teams.

But there’s a right way to relinquish this control to department heads with the right controls in place. So, what’s the solution?

The solution:

• Department-based roles. Administrators can create teams to represent each department and assign team managers to each team. This keeps each department’s expenses neat and organized. The team managers (department heads) you assign come with in-built permissions like the ability to freeze team member cards, but can’t amend card limits, for example.
• Approval routine based on team or budget ownership. Being able to assign the right people to approve expenses is essential for cost control and risk reduction. You might decide you want the approval chain to follow your team’s hierarchy, or perhaps you want the budget owner to sign off on expenses instead. Using a no-code custom workflow designer, you can build any approval command chain you want for all different expense types.
• Budget visibility for cost center owners. Budget owners can access real-time visibility through the Payhawk portal, which means there’s no need to wait for month-end reporting. Track all spend against budgets in one place. View both budget utilization as a percentage or its actual value, and remain in the know with real-time budget alerts notifying you when you’re approaching the top of your budget or when you overspend.
• Separate roles by region, team, budget, and more. Having such flexibility when creating user roles is a great way to separate and control spend for different reasons. For example, one user might have a different role across multiple teams, or a department head might want to track spend without making changes, so it’s essential that your spend management platform is able to accommodate your organization's structure, whether it's a single entity or a large multi-entity.

The challenge: Wanting internal controls without slowing everything down

Micromanaging can cause tension and friction and slow down many internal processes. Many organizations face the challenge of introducing internal controls without standing over everyone’s shoulders as they make business purchases.
 
It can be hard to relinquish control and trust employees to make compliant spending decisions. But, there’s a middle ground that gives both parties exactly what they want and need to make accountable spending a reality.
 
Here’s how to reduce the risk of fraud while keeping your team efficient.

The solution:

• Rule-based workflows. Building custom workflows for every payment type removes friction and confusion from the expense management process. Create steps in your workflow like submit, approve, review, confirm details, authorize, pay, etc. Creating steps and a workflow that, once set up, runs by itself is not only a major time saver but also ensures compliant spending.
• Automated policy enforcement. With Payhawk, spend controls and policies are automatically built into the spend platform. This means it’s easy to set limits for certain individuals or projects, restrict spending, and control which vendors or merchants your end-users can purchase from. Auto-block cards as soon as previous expense documents are late, with cards unblocking automatically once their tasks have been fulfilled. All of these measures ensure out-of-policy spending is a thing of the past.

My favorite feature is having the ability to assign spend policies to employees. I like it because it empowers employees to perform their job functions without having to ask for permission to spend money that they have already budgeted.

— Leon Steenbrink, CFO, Mercell  

• Audit logs and exceptions tracking. When there’s a problem, you need a solution that helps you quickly find and fix problems with expenses before they turn into a bigger issue. That means accessing comprehensive digital audit logs with the ability to view the history of every expense and card transaction, which supports compliance and encourages transparency. Receive notifications for successful and failed transactions, and reasons for the failures to help you investigate further should you need to.
• Specialized roles for AP clerks, finance admins, and managers. Segregation of duties is essential, not only to minimize fraudulent expenses, but to speed up the expense management process and lessen the admin strain on one person. Create specialized roles in Payhawk for every team member and assign responsibilities for each to keep the process as efficient and accountable as possible while maintaining continuous oversight and eliminating unnecessary hand-offs.

Get the complete Mercell story in the video below.

The challenge: Cutting through the clutter and seeing only the fields and values relevant to my expense

If you present employees with multiple irrelevant fields and value options, you slow down the expense submission process and increase the likelihood of mistakes. By slimming down their options, you enforce certain expense submission standards, streamlining the process for everyone across the organization.

Let’s say you have more than 200 expense fields. That’s a lot of fields you’re expecting employees to sift through. What if they didn’t have to search all the codes? And what if accountants didn’t need to continue fixing mistakes brought about by this process?

The good news: There are plenty of features you can use to vastly improve your users’ experience and their data view.

The solution:

• User roles and team-based visibility: In Payhawk, expense visibility is tied to user roles and team assignments. Employees can only see the expenses they submit themselves. Team managers get one additional view: expenses from their team. If you didn’t submit it, and you don’t manage the team, you can’t see it. That’s how we keep your data safe and secure.
• Custom views for users and teams: With saved filters, you can create custom views for specific users or teams. For example, filter by “document not uploaded” to instantly spot missing receipts. By removing the clutter, everyone sees only what’s relevant to their job. The result is a faster, cleaner process with no distractions.
• Automatic population of expense fields: Set default values for expense categories or let Payhawk AI make smart suggestions based on past activity. Either way, you cut down on manual input and make life easier for employees.

Controlling data access is essential — and Payhawk has you covered

We make it simple to stay compliant with legal and regulatory standards, while giving you granular role-based access control. When it comes to spend management, there’s no room for shortcuts, especially as your business scales.

Our platform gives you flexible, customizable solutions to match the way your organization works. We’re here to help you succeed, with a best-in-class spend management system that’s easy for everyone to use.

Want to see how it works in practice? Book a personalized demo and explore our data access controls in action.