The true price of bank-issued cards for finance teams

It never starts with a crisis — but the cost of bank-issued corporate cards builds quietly.

A sales rep takes a client to Steak 48 in Houston and forgets to upload the $600 receipt. A manager upgrades the company’s Zoom Enterprise plan on the spot with the corporate card and only tells finance weeks later. Someone in marketing books a last-minute Delta flight outside the approved travel portal because “it was faster.”

On their own, these moments don’t feel disastrous. But multiply them across a business with hundreds of employees, dozens of departments, and thousands of transactions, and finance teams are suddenly drowning.

This is card chaos. And it’s costing more than anyone likes to admit.

When finance teams become firefighters instead of strategists

Ask any mid-market Controller at month-end, and you’ll hear the same story:
• Missing receipts
• Mismatched reports
• Budget surprises that only surface after statements arrive

Finance ends up firefighting instead of steering the business. Teams spend hours chasing colleagues and patching spreadsheets — a cycle that erodes trust and visibility.

It’s exhausting, repetitive, and it eats away at the team’s credibility. Leaders want insight. What finance delivers under these conditions is explanation.

The finance leaders I talk to describe the same picture,” says Catie O’Gara, Country Director, US at Payhawk. “It’s not just late data. It’s the constant noise: the chasing, the patching, the stress. That’s what card chaos really feels like.

The ripple effects nobody budgets for

The cost of card chaos isn’t just a messy month-end. It seeps into every corner of the business.

Forecasts get delayed because finance can’t rely on the data. Budgets get blown because overspend isn’t flagged until it’s too late. Approval processes become rigid bottlenecks, frustrating employees who just want to get their jobs done.

And behind the scenes, finance talent, highly skilled professionals hired to add strategic value, spend their days as administrators, chasing paper in digital form. That loss of focus, energy, and morale is the real hidden cost.

And the numbers tell the same story.

According to Payhawk’s 2025 survey of over 1,000 finance executives, 84% of US finance leaders say they value their existing bank relationships more than potential efficiency gains from fintechs. At the same time, 81% admit that separating their cards from those relationships would be operationally complex.

That tension explains why so many US finance teams stay stuck in reactive cycles. They want better visibility and control, but not at the cost of disrupting credit lines, rewards, and treasury continuity.

Why expense software alone couldn’t fix corporate card chaos

Expense tools like Concur and Expensify promised to simplify reporting. But they still only automate what happens after money is spent.
Without proactive spend controls, overspending continues — just with cleaner spreadsheets.

That’s why finance leaders who adopted these tools years ago are still stuck explaining, chasing, and patching. The surface looks better. Underneath, the chaos is alive and well.

A calmer way forward

For 86% of US finance leaders, their existing cards already support spend visibility, but only on delay. What they really need is visibility in real time. Card chaos isn’t inevitable.

Payhawk connects directly to existing corporate cards, giving finance:
• Real-time transaction visibility
• Automated policy enforcement
• Instant approvals and budget guardrails
• Virtual project cards for smarter organization

With card linking, every transaction flows into Payhawk in real time, so finance sees spend the moment it happens. No lag. No surprises at month-end.

With controls on linked cards, rules are enforced automatically. Out-of-policy merchants are blocked. Budgets are capped. Approvals route instantly before spend goes through. Chaos is prevented at the source, not cleaned up after the fact.

And with virtual cards, teams gain new ways to stay organized, issuing project-specific cards with their own budgets and limits, or giving departments their own guardrails without losing oversight.

“The first question I hear is always: Do we have to switch our cards?” says Catie. “And the answer is no. You keep your banks, your rewards, your credit lines — and you finally gain the control that stops chaos before it starts.”

Did you know?

• Finance teams spend an estimated 20–40% of their time on low-value transaction matching every month.
• Delayed financial visibility doesn’t just create stress, it directly undermines budget control and strategic decision-making.
• Companies adopting real-time spend management have reported reducing their month-end close from five days or more to under 24 hours.

These numbers show just how costly card chaos really is, and why it’s worth taking a closer look at Payhawk’s capabilities to discover what’s possible when finance finally moves from firefighting to proactive control.

From chaos to clarity

Card chaos will never show up as a neat line item on the P&L, but finance leaders know it’s there. It shows up in lost time, blown budgets, frustrated employees, and teams that never get to be as strategic as they should be.

That doesn’t have to be the norm. With Payhawk, finance can modernize the way it manages spend, gaining real-time visibility, proactive control, and calm continuity, all on the cards they already use.

That’s how you put an end to card chaos.

See how US finance leaders are moving from card chaos to clarity. Book a demo today.