Time is money: 7 hidden time thieves costing your finance team

They don’t wear masks or pick locks, but they’re still robbing your finance department.

We’re talking about time thieves: the small, seemingly insignificant manual tasks, inefficient processes, and messy workflows that quietly steal hours each day. 

Every week, finance teams lose over 26 hours to tedious, manual tasks. That’s more than three full workdays, gone. The culprits? Hidden time thieves are embedded in your workflows.

Over weeks and months, those hours add up. When your finance team spends most of their day on manual tasks, team members don’t have the time, headspace, or data to concentrate on the big picture. 

That leaves finance teams and CFOs on the back foot, unable to contribute to strategic conversations that drive business growth. In this article, we’ll cover common time thieves, their potential impact, plus practical ways to take back your time. 

Meet the time thieves 

From tracking down receipts to answering the same questions over and over again, meet the seven hidden time thieves draining your finance team. 

1. The receipt hunt

Crumpled receipts shoved into a desk drawer. Blurry photo uploads. Endless reminder emails.  

Finance teams shouldn’t have to play detective, but too often, they’re left to hunt down receipts and decode what they’re actually for. But this time thief doesn’t just impact finance — employees have to spend time scanning their receipts, or filling out paperwork to get them approved. 

It’s tedious for employees, too, scanning receipts, filling out forms, and following up. Every minute spent chasing paper is a minute not spent moving the business forward.

2. The approval maze

A single transaction shouldn’t take long to approve. But often, finance teams need to navigate complicated email chains or fight their way through multiple layers of approval with no real transparency.

It’s slow, it’s confusing, and it leaves everyone guessing, from the person waiting for approval to the person approving the expense. 

3. The data double-up

Copy. Paste. Repeat. 

Many finance teams spend hours each day manually inputting data from invoices, receipts, and bank statements into accounting software. It’s not fun. It’s not fast.

Even worse, it’s not effective. One wrong number or misplaced decimal can create reports that don’t add up and spreadsheets that don’t tally. 

Suddenly, finance teams have even less time to focus on the work that matters, because they’re too busy trying to find and fix the mess. 

4. The reconciliation riddle

The painstaking process of manually matching transactions and receipts is a necessary, if slightly tedious, part of the job for finance teams. 

But before that can even happen, it’s time to play detective. Chasing down missing receipts, correcting discrepancies, and decoding vague expense descriptions leave finance teams dreading the end of the month. 

And before long, it’s time to do it all over again. 

5. The forecasting fog

When spend data is outdated or scattered across different systems, you’re forced to steer the business through the fog. 

Real-time decisions are impossible because there’s no up-to-date data. Forecasting feels more like guesswork than strategy, and finance leaders have to base their decisions on outdated information, because that’s all they’ve got. 

6. The budgeting bottleneck

Tracking budget versus actual spend shouldn’t require a spreadsheet marathon. But for many finance teams, this is still a manual, reactive process that happens too late. 

By the time overspending is identified, it’s too late to do anything about it. That makes it hard to allocate funds effectively in real-time, or stay agile in an economically volatile world. 

7. The question quagmire

“What’s the spending limit on client dinners?”

“Just checking to see if you’ve processed my reimbursement yet?” 

“Can I use my card for this subscription and get reimbursed later?” 

When employees don’t know the answer, they ask finance. Often, that leaves finance teams fielding the same questions over and over again. Not because they want to, but because the information isn’t readily available to everyone else. 

The impact of hidden time thieves 

Individually, time thieves seem pretty harmless. Just a few lost hours here and there. No big deal, right? 

But they add up. Fast. 

Our report, Buried Treasury: Uncovering the Secret to Financial Stability, found that finance teams are losing 26.4 hours every week to manual treasury tasks. 

That’s over three full workdays every week. Lost time isn’t the only impact. Imagine what your team could achieve with that time back, faster forecasting, better insights, and more room for strategic work.

Here’s how else time thieves are costing your finance team:

• Productivity takes a nose dive: When everyone’s tied up on manual tasks, there’s less time for high-impact, productive work. 
• Errors creep in: Manual data entry increases the chances of errors and mistakes, which then need to be found and resolved. 
• Frustration builds: Repetitive manual work and constant chasing gradually impact your finance team’s engagement and satisfaction. 
• The risk of burnout increases: Burnout is typically caused by chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been resolved, like endless manual tasks and fixing errors. 
• Delayed insights: Without real-time data, finance leaders have to base their decisions on outdated information. 

At the same time, the role of finance is evolving. No longer just an operational backbone, CFOs and their teams are expected to lead on strategy. But our report also found that 51% of teams don’t have the time to focus on strategic work, because they’re stuck dealing with the time thieves.

To embrace their potential and get involved in high-level business strategy, finance teams need to reclaim their time. That starts with unmasking the time thieves. 

How to unmask the time thieves 

Time thieves aren’t just part and parcel of finance. Modern finance teams are reclaiming their time by following this four-step framework: 

• Audit current processes: Map out the daily, weekly, and monthly processes completed by each member of the finance team. Include a rough estimate of how long each task takes. 
• Identify time-consuming manual tasks: Highlight the manual tasks that take up the most time. These are the time thieves to focus on eliminating. 
• Leverage automation tools and AI tech: Automation is one of the best ways to stop time thieves in their tracks. Pleo replaces shared cards, instantly captures receipts, allows real-time spend tracking, and syncs with the rest of your tech stack. AI-powered spending guidelines instantly answer employee expense questions, leaving you to focus on high-level tasks. 
• Review and optimise: Regular reviews help finance teams check if your current automation tools are working and identify any adjustments.
  

Beat the time thieves and take back control 

Imagine what your finance team could do with three extra days a week. 

Time thieves aren’t just draining hours. They’re blocking progress and holding your team back from their best work. 

By replacing the busywork with Europe’s most trusted spend management platform, you unlock the time and headspace your team needs to forecast faster, advise better, and make a real impact.

Ready to find out more about how treasury teams are navigating the future and taking back control? Download our latest report: Buried Treasury: Uncovering the Secret to Financial Stability.