Expense processes often fall behind when a business grows quickly. More people are spending, so managers have more expenses to review and approvals start to pile up. Different teams apply the policy in different ways, and month-end takes longer to close.
Finance teams address these growing pains by scaling expense approval processes, but it’s not always clear when to update the current setup. Below are five finance team scaling challenges that signal it’s time to change, along with the expense management capabilities that address each one.
When a company is small, one set of expense rules is usually enough. As the business grows, each team’s expenses start to look different. For example, a sales manager might need a higher travel allowance, while an operations lead needs to pay different suppliers.
Create an expense management setup that lets you set limits and policies by team and role. Finance can then stop out-of-policy purchases before they happen, which saves time and closes the books faster.
In practice, this kind of control starts with card limits. Finance can set a monthly or per-transaction cap on each card, so people can only spend what their role requires. Category blocks go further and stop certain purchases entirely, such as ATM withdrawals or spending with certain types of merchants.
Limits and blocks can’t anticipate every situation, so it also helps to check each expense against a specific policy point as it comes in. Some expense management platforms use AI to apply company spending rules and flag exceptions as they happen. That leaves finance free to concentrate on the expenses that break the rules.
Together, these controls give employees the room to buy what they need, while keeping every purchase within policy as the company grows.
In a small company, the founder or finance lead can approve every expense. As headcount grows, those people become the bottleneck because they spend time signing off small receipts while larger requests sit in the queue.
This is where scaling expense approval processes helps. Use approval workflows that route each expense to the right person based on team, budget, project or amount. Smaller purchases can stop with a line manager, while larger ones pass through two or three approvers before reaching finance.
Advanced approval workflows let finance build approval chains that reflect how the organisation is structured. Each chain can end with a finance review, which gives the finance team the final say on every expense. Approvers also don’t need admin access, so team leads can sign off on their own team’s expenses without wider permissions.
For businesses with several entities or cost centres, the same approval rules can apply across all of them. Each entity and cost centre then follows one consistent process. Senior approvers only see the expenses that need their attention, and everything else keeps moving.
Budget owners are responsible for keeping their teams on track, but they often only see the full picture at month-end. By that point, any overspend has already happened and it’s too late to prevent it.
Your expense management platform should give budget owners a real-time view of expenses by team, project or cost centre. They can then check where they stand at any point in the month and adjust before costs run over. Finance also has fewer surprises to deal with at close.
Tags and categories make the real-time view possible. When each expense is tagged to a team, project or cost centre, it appears in the right budget owner’s view as soon as it’s recorded. Reporting gets easier too, since expenses are already sorted by the time finance needs them.
When Wingstop’s UK franchise grew from 40 to nearly 100 locations in two years, tagging and better categorisation in Pleo made it easier to track pre-opening costs and monitor budgets. The finance team also cut the time spent reviewing expenses by about 70%.
“Pleo’s an integral part of the way that we do business. It gives us the freedom to invest in culture and motivation, while making expense management incredibly simple,” says Suraj Mehta, Financial Controller at Wingstop.
Re-keying expenses into the accounting system is manageable at a few hundred transactions a month. As volume grows, it slows down the close and introduces errors that take even longer to find.
One of the quickest ways to cut that manual work is to connect your expense management platform directly to your accounting system. Look for an integration that works in both directions. In one direction, your chart of accounts, tax codes, and accounting dimensions (such as departments or projects) sync into the expense platform, so each expense is categorised using the same structure as your books.
In the other direction, expenses and receipts export to the accounting system with the right categories attached, and bookkeepers can update tags and categories before export. Supplier details can sync in both directions too, keeping both systems up to date.
With less re-keying, there are fewer errors to chase and month-end moves faster.
Expanding into a new country usually means setting up a new legal company or entity. Each entity might need a different currency, local approvers and a set of books. When those entities run on separate systems, every new market adds more work for finance.
A single platform for every entity and currency removes most of that extra work. Finance can see expenses across the whole business without switching between systems or combining reports by hand.
Expanding into new markets also changes who should approve expenses. If every approval has to go through the head office, a team in New York might wait for finance in London to start their day before getting purchase approval. Giving each entity its own approvers keeps work moving across time zones and keeps project costs within budget.
New Flag, a München-based beauty brand builder with around 300 employees, runs entities across Germany, the Netherlands, France and other countries. With Pleo, its finance team now manages expenses for all of them in one place, even as the business has grown.
“We can manage all business spend with at least a 50 to 60% time reduction, and that’s while adding more entities and more work,” says Patrick Hofer, CFO at New Flag. “So the actual savings are even higher.”
Before the next hiring push or market launch, check whether your expense management platform supports these capabilities:
These capabilities work best together. Clear policies speed up approvals, real-time visibility helps budget owners stay on track and connected accounting turns it all into a faster close. Effective expense management for growing companies builds those links early, so each new team or entity joins a process that already works.
Find out how Pleo supports scaling expense approval processes, or book a demo and talk to us.