Most businesses handle their largest spending decisions strategically. When you hire someone, the contract passes through several people before anyone puts pen to paper and signs it. When you onboard a supplier contract worth over £20,000, someone builds a business case for it. 

Decentralised spend is everything else. It’s the everyday buying that happens across teams and sites, outside procurement and outside any formal approval: software subscriptions, travel, fuel, maintenance and frontline supplies.  

While these costs account for 80% of transactions, they make up roughly 20% of the total value, making decentralised spend the fastest-growing type of spend in most businesses and one that finance has the least visibility and control over. 

It’s also the spend that scales fastest when a business grows: add a new team or site, and this spend multiplies straight away, while the process for controlling it stays the same. 

How decentralised spend accrues 

Decentralised spend helps people get their work done. It builds up one decision at a time, and each purchase is small enough to pass without review. It falls into three areas: 

  • Departmental spend 
    A design tool still charges the business every month, two years after the person who bought it left.  
  • Operational spend 
    A site still pays a maintenance contractor at the rate it agreed to three years ago because it’s too small to go through procurement. 
  • Travel and expenses (T&E) 
    An employee pays for a hotel out of pocket ahead of a client visit. Reimbursement takes weeks, and finance only sees the full cost of the business trip once the claim has been filed. 

Controlling company spend  

Soldo gives every team a budget and a card with a pre-defined limit. The team can spend without asking finance, because your internal spend policy is loaded onto the card. Every transaction is matched and coded to the team and budget it came from, so finance sees what has been spent without waiting for a month-end report or a pile of receipts. 

Unnecessary subscriptions become immediately identifiable, rather than going unnoticed. Finance has approved the budget and can see where decentralised spend is going. 

Rob Essex, Financial Controller at NHBC, describes what visibility gave his finance team: “We’ve moved from 95% processing and 5% thinking to 50% processing and 50% thinking.” 

That gave Rob’s team time to work on growth initiatives. Employees no longer wait up to eight weeks for reimbursement, and finance isn’t stuck in reactive mode, chasing people and receipts. They now spend that time forecasting and building the case for the next finance hire.  

As businesses add teams and sites, visibility scales with them. Finance retains control, and teams keep moving without waiting for approval, allowing the business and people to grow.