Are expenses killing your business?

Chief Financial Officer at Caxton, Trevor Price, explains how Financial Controllers should take ownership of expense management to safeguard business growth.

To grow your business, its more than likely that you have to spend money to make money. That’s why the average UK company sets aside £230,000 for employee expenses every year on travel, meals and hospitality.

Unfortunately, our research shows if you’re still using manual reconciliation to process expenses you are likely to harm the return on that investment.

Expenses have long been a source of friction between finance teams and their commercial colleagues. Over-complicated rules on how expenses should be recorded, categorised and reimbursed quickly lead to inefficiency and a breakdown in trust between two critical business functions: those that make money and those who protect it.

What’s needed is an end-to-end, automated system which supports business growth and gives full oversight to the accounts team. Such a system will make a hero out of financial controllers and restore trust between colleagues.


Manual systems and a weak or absent expenses policy lie at the heart of these problems. Let’s focus on productivity. It takes the accounts team longer to process expenses when they’re dealing with bits of paper stapled to an expense form. Our research puts this at four days a month on average.


The same research shows that misreporting is rife, with 86% reporting abuse of company expenses in the last 12 months. And companies still using manual reconciliation are more at risk.

When business leaders are entrusting hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of company money to employees, you’d think they would want some rules around how the money should be spent.


Yet 17% of UK businesses have no employee expenses policy. Amazingly, this is even more true of the very largest companies who have over 1000 employees and set aside in excess of £410,000 per year for expenses. A further third (36%) agreed that their policy needs updating

Is your expense policy up-to-date, fit-for-purpose and understood-by-all? Do you even have one? If the answer to either question is ‘no’, it’s time to take ownership and make it happen. Use our guide: 'What does a good expense policy look like?'.

About the Author:

Trevor is a strategically focussed CFO with an innovative approach to adding value. Backed by a track record of driving growth in fast paced international business, his focus is driving the future of payments and improving the speed and efficiency of clients’ financial processes.