Most healthcare organisations still rely on petty cash and paper trails for their everyday spending. Staff grab notes from a tin, spend them on supplies for the organisation or residents and return with the receipts.
It may feel straightforward, especially when everyone’s used to it, but your finance team would disagree. Because when your teams spend with cash, finance spends days on manual reconciliation while frontline care staff wait weeks for reimbursements. Not only that, but compliance takes a back seat in a sector where regulation isn’t optional.
These are the loose ends petty cash leaves behind. Across teams, sites and hundreds of small purchases, they give finance a steady stream of detective work: tracking down receipts, matching amounts and piecing together an audit trail. For healthcare organisations already balancing stretched teams, tight margins and audit demands, that’s a cost worth examining.
Read more: Petty cash: What is it, and how do you manage it?
Care comes first. Always. But managing spend across care homes, clinics and community sites? That’s a whole different challenge.
Between CQC audits, grant funding that demands penny-perfect tracking, and dedicated teams whose focus should be on people (not paper receipts), petty cash can create friction right where you need clarity most.
We’ve heard repeatedly from people in the care industry that petty cash really feels out-of-place with the needs of modern organisations.
Aside from the hours your finance team is spending every month on manual work, the cash tin actually causes cascading problems that ripple across your organisation:
Growing compliance exposure: In healthcare, regulators expect audit-ready records, accurately categorised transactions and clear evidence of who spent what and why. Petty cash creates gaps, meaning when audit time comes, Finance has to reconstruct the trail.
Delayed staff reimbursements: When Finance is manually verifying every receipt before they approve reimbursements, your team is sat waiting, sometimes weeks, for their money back.
Limited visibility across sites: If your cash handling is scattered across care homes, clinics, and community sites, finance is left to work with educated guesses. It’s nearly impossible to forecast accurately when funds are being spent off-grid, let alone spot cost-saving wins or consistently enforce policies. In a multi-site setup, the problem quickly adds up: every location runs its own cash tin, builds its own paper trail, and leaves a mounting reconciliation backlog at the end of every month.
Petty cash was designed for a different era. Modern healthcare expense management demands clarity, compliance, and control.
With Pleo, three things change:
Pleo issues smart cards (physical or virtual) to companies, with financial admins deciding who gets a card and what the spending limit on it should be. Every time someone spends, they’re prompted to add a photo of the receipt straight away and finance gets full visibility from every site in real time.
One healthcare provider, Knodd, started using Pleo’s virtual cards and reclaimed 5–10 hours per month in reconciliation time, plus 1–2 hours per week on receipt admin.
“Before hiring our first in-house financial role, Pleo was my finance partner.” - Jakob Hedlund, Co-founder and CEO @ Knodd
Every transaction is logged and categorised automatically. The moment a purchase is made, that spend is tagged for compliance, safeguarding and grant reporting. Which means your audit evidence builds itself.
Second Step, another multi-site healthcare provider, cleared a 6-month reconciliation backlog and now spends 10 hours less on finance admin than they did before. All because that expense data arrived already audit-ready without them having to follow a paper trail.
"Pleo saves us around 10 hours of manual work a month. We finally have a solution that allows us to stay in control."Bartosz Zimniewicz, Finance Manager @ Second Step
With Pleo, your expense policy is baked directly into smart cards before a single pound is spent. Finance centrally sets custom spending limits, merchant categories, and approval workflows, giving site managers and carers clear boundaries to work within.
Healthcare organisations that have moved to Pleo tell us:
Finance gets back hours per month to spend on higher-value tasks.
Compliance strengthens because audit data is automatic and comprehensive.
Staff morale improves because reimbursements are faster and easier.
Your current process may feel ‘easier’ to stick with. But it costs you time, compliance assurance and the full picture.
Ready to find a simpler way to manage your spend? Learn more.