It’s hard to know where you stand with spend management – until a crisis hits, or you’re trying to scale.
If you’re feeling the strain of slow approvals, manual reporting, or frustrated teams, you’re not alone. It’s a pain many learn to live with.
But whether businesses are aware of the cost or not, European businesses lose as much as £301 billion on inefficient expense processes.
Leaving spend management to run in the background only delays the inevitable.
You don’t have to start by fixing everything. Taking control starts with a single step: having a clear picture of where you are now.
Gain clarity on how your business manages spend – and where your biggest opportunities for growth are – with the Soldo Spend Health Assessment Tool.
Every business has a spend management challenge.
Some struggle to move fast. Others struggle to stay in control.
Maybe your business has clear visibility and control of every pound that’s spent – but giving teams the freedom to spend when they need to still feels risky or hard to control.
That tension between governance and responsiveness matters. It stops you from moving as fast as opportunities appear.
Our research among 300 finance leaders in the UK and Italy revealed just how divided businesses are when it comes to choosing control or agility. Only a few are achieving both.
Or maybe you’re spending too much time on admin — chasing approvals, fixing errors, and trying to keep everything compliant.
So, you find yourself chasing approvals or micromanaging.
It’s not just a feeling. Our data shows that finance tea significantly more time managing decentralised spending than employees or managers realise.
These individual challenges often point to something bigger: a systemic issue with how spending is managed and supported across the business.
Every business has a spend management challenge.
So, reaching your optimal “spend health” is just about maintaining control and oversight or reducing inefficiencies.
It’s a comprehensive balance of systems, behaviours, and insights that allows you to strike the right balance between all your business’s competing priorities.
When we asked finance leaders about their biggest challenges, adaptability, inter-team friction, and decision-making gaps rose to the top.
They’re not isolated issues. They reflect deeper gaps in what we call “spend health.”
What does a healthy spend management process look like?
If you’re still modernising your finance function, ‘spend management’ can feel like a broad, complex concept
So, we’ve broken it down into five key areas. Think of these as the pillars of strong spend health. Each one helps you build a more scalable, efficient way to manage money across the business.
- Order – You’ve got clear visibility and control across the business
- Agility – Teams can adapt quickly when spending needs shift
- Efficiency – Admin doesn’t get in the way of action
- Productivity – People are empowered to spend without being micromanaged
- Sustainability – Your spending aligns with climate expectations and internal ESG goals
Get the right balance between these five, and you’ll have a clearer, faster, more future-ready way to manage business spend.
Why order matters in spend management
Order doesn’t start with a transaction. It starts with the rules you set.
When you set clear spending limits, create team budgets, and define pre-approvals up front, you make it easier for the business to scale without increasing risk.
This can look like pre-approvals for recurring spend or setting team-specific budgets in advance.
In theory, that’s simple. But in reality? Spend is often decentralised — split across departments, branches, or regions — and controlled by multiple, disconnected teams. That complexity adds up fast.
The more frequently people across your business need to access funds, the harder it is to stay organised.
And without order, you lose clarity, slow down decisions, and risk slipping into reactive mode.
Why agility matters in spend management
Some businesses have a firm grip on spend control. Every transaction is authorised. Every policy followed to the letter.
But here’s the catch: when the rules are too rigid, no one feels empowered to spend. That’s counterproductive, because in business, you often have to spend money to make money.
Picture this: your CMO spots a prime speaking slot at a top industry event – front-row exposure to your ideal audience. But she’s got 24 hours to secure it.
If she has to wait for a long approval process or go through procurement red tape, the opportunity’s gone. You’ve saved the budget. But you’ve missed your chance to stand out and your next chance to reach that pool of potential buyers won’t come around until next year.
Finance leaders are starting to recognise the need for agility. In fact, 61% say they frequently need to react to changing circumstances.
They know: Sacrificing agility is sacrificing growth.
Why efficiency matters in spend management
Month-end means creating, reviewing, and reporting on company spend. It’s how you track how money is used — and whether it’s making a difference.
It should be straightforward. But it’s one of the finance team’s least-loved tasks.
Because it means chasing. Chasing missing receipts, delayed submissions, last-minute approvals. And often, you’re doing it all in spreadsheets that were never designed for accuracy or speed.
Worst of all? You can’t rush it because it’s highly prone to human error.
European businesses lose up to £34 billion every year just on receipt processing mistakes. This is exactly the kind of process that should be automated.
Why productivity matters in spend management
Did you know your finance team could save up to 80% of the time they spend approving monthly reports?
Or that switching from petty cash to expense cards could give back as much as 50 hours every month?
If you did, you’re in the minority. Most leaders underestimate the true productivity cost of manual finance processes.
In our research, 34% more CFOs than Finance Leads underestimated the time their teams spend managing spend.
It’s a hidden productivity drain that limits both team capacity and business efficiency.
Outdated processes, bottlenecks, and friction between departments slow you down more than you realise.
Why sustainability matters in spend management
Sustainability is a pillar that’s rapidly moving from optional to essential.
More than ever, businesses are expected to align spending with environmental and social values.
But without visibility into where, how, and why money is spent, aligning with ESG expectations becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Whether it’s tracking carbon-intensive vendor spend, reducing paper receipts, or reporting on sustainable sourcing, spend health includes your company’s ability to align financial practices with climate responsibility.
And as regulations evolve, spend sustainability will become more than a best practice – it’ll be a business requirement.
Good spend health is within reach
These challenges are far from unfixable.
With the right systems, smarter processes, and clearer visibility, even the most complex spend environments can become easier to manage.
How Soldo helps
- Order: Set and enforce spending rules before money leaves the account. You can create team budgets, set limits for specific categories, and issue company cards linked to pre-approved funds. Real-time visibility means finance can see exactly where every pound goes.
- Agility : Give decision-makers controlled access to budget on company cards, so they can quickly act on high-value opportunities. Spend policies are built in, so finance stays confident while teams move quickly. Keep the agility to say “yes” when it matters — without losing oversight.
- Efficiency: Automate the manual work that slows month-end to a crawl. Receipts can be captured on the spot via the mobile app, expenses are matched automatically, and transactions are visible as they happen. This means less time chasing paperwork and more time analysing results.
- Productivity: End repetitive approval and reconciliation tasks by automating them. Company cards with built-in rules remove the need for petty cash or reimbursement, while smart integrations send spend data straight into your accounting software.
- Sustainability: Align spending with sustainability goals. You can track spend by vendor or category, spot high-carbon suppliers, and reduce paper use with digital receipts and automated workflows
Finance teams can move from firefighting to forward-thinking. Business units can operate with more autonomy, without sacrificing control. And the time lost to inefficiency? It can be reclaimed and reinvested where it matters most.
Getting to that point starts with understanding where you stand today.
