Every finance team has a story like this. From shared cards with many owners to duplicate subscriptions rolling over every month, this is a tale of how and why a Finance Director fixed spend control and visibility across her business. 

Chapter 1: Once upon a time… 

A little over 18 months had passed when the Finance Director realised she was understanding less of the bank statement every month.  

Three names were attached to the account: one belonged to someone who had left six months earlier, another to an employee on maternity leave and the third to someone who had inherited access a year ago. Each month, she spotted another five or six entries she couldn’t identify. 

At this point, the Finance Director needed to know who could use the card and improve the system through better controls and greater visibility.  

Chapter 2: What the Finance Director did next 

One Tuesday afternoon, she pulled up 12 months of statements and listed every unique merchant in a Teams message to managers. “Does anyone recognise any of the transactions, and do you still use these products or services?” she asked. 

The majority of replies came back within a day or two, while two managers asked that the list be resent.  

By the end of the week, the Finance Director had 32 recurring charges: 

Nine were needed. 

Over a quarter were for duplicate tools. 

Seven were products the team had stopped using or forgotten about. 

Five were trial periods that had accidentally lapsed. 

Three remained unaccounted for. 

The Finance Director realised she needed a way to give people access to spending without losing control. So, she cancelled subscriptions, implemented Soldo and reissued cards to employees with predefined limits. Now, every transaction appears in the system assigned to an employee or team with contextual data automatically tagged. 

Chapter 3: The audit continues 

No longer playing Cluedo with one card and one team, she started asking others around the business.  

Armed with visibility, she questioned the regional office paying a supplier the same rate for the past four years. She queried the team using a shared login to manage their budget software. She probed the sales team on why the same client lunch from five months ago appeared on two different expense sheets. 

Chapter 4: Visibility in practice 

The Finance Director had not hired anyone new or replaced an existing system. She introduced control with built-in rules and budgets, replacing the shared cards and manual processes. As every transaction arrives tagged to a cost centre, the answer to “What did we spend on tools this quarter?” became immediately available. 

Rob Essex, Financial Controller at UK-based building standards body NHBC, describes the impact this change has had: “We’ve moved from 95% processing and 5% thinking, to 50% processing and 50% thinking.” Reimbursement times at NHBC dropped from six to eight weeks to one week. The finance team saved 86% of the time it used to spend on reimbursements and 45% of the time it spent processing expenses.  

Chapter 5: Happily ever after 

This story is not specific to one Finance Director or company; it’s a common experience for finance leaders in growing businesses.  

Rather than treating spend control as a large finance transformation project, spend management addresses the specific problems finance and employees experience day-to-day, such as shared cards with limited visibility and multiple subscriptions with no owner. 

See how other growing businesses have made the shift: https://www.soldo.com/en-gb/people-like-you/