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From spreadsheets to strategy: Why expense management needs a digital makeover
Ah, expenses. For some, the word evokes the agony of sifting through a drawer stuffed with miscellaneous receipts over Christmas while the family carouses downstairs. Others recall their fury at finding the proof of an expensive purchase shredded in the washing machine.
Modern technology spares business owners this pain. And moving away from manual expense management and reporting doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. Change can be small and incremental: swapping your spreadsheet for digital tools; snapping receipts at the point of sale; automated approvals for standard outgoings; and integrations with your business’ accounting software.
Real-world example: Street Lane Bakery
Gabriella Win is on this journey right now. The 19-year-old psychology student works at Street Lane Bakery, Leeds’ only kosher bakery, and is modernising its processes and systems around a psychology degree. “Most of what we do right now is a paper process,” she says. “I’m trying to move everything to a digital process and implement new technologies.”
At a bakery, where everything is made fresh every day, expenses come in thick and fast. Whether it’s an urgent order of flour or yeast or a quick run to the local supermarket to pick up extra tomatoes, “we have a lot of expenses,” says Win.
“Expenses are already recorded in Xero but we would like to connect this information with our other operational systems, so that the data can be used for forecasting, reporting, and automation.” Without the expense being logged in Street Lane Bakery’s point of sale or production software, the business can’t turn it into useful data.
Win’s digital transformation will not only take pressure off the finance team, and help management plan ahead, it will also give better visibility of stock across Street Lane’s online platforms. Plus help the bakery automate many processes, such as ordering more ingredients ahead of Jewish holidays. “I want to move away from paper-based and manual processes to make way for technology that will allow us to use our data more effectively,” she explains.
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Turning expense management into a financial strategy
Win is automating expenses alongside a root-and-branch digital transformation of the bakery. However, many businesses are still treating expenses as a low-value administrative function, rather than a strategic priority.
This is short-sighted, says Harvey Dhillon, the Founder and CEO of Zmartly, a UK accountancy firm.
The way a business handles employee expenses has a direct impact on productivity, financial visibility, compliance and employee experience. He believes that any business still relying on a traditional manual expense process is at a disadvantage.
“The problem isn’t the spreadsheet. It is the gap between spending the money and recording it,” he says. “A receipt sits in an email thread for three weeks, the VAT on it is never reclaimed, and by month-end nobody can remember what it was for, so the sign-off becomes a rubber stamp.”
Spreadsheets can’t automatically enforce company policies. They can’t validate receipts, detect duplicate claims or provide real-time approval routing without significant manual effort. They’re also prone to typing errors.
“Proper expenses software closes that gap,” says Dhillon. “The receipt is captured at the point of spend, coded there and then, and whoever approves it can actually see what they are approving.”
Say goodbye to spreadsheets, we beg you
As a Fractional CFO working with neurodivergent business owners, Sylvie Frankel spends her life encouraging clients to modernise outdated processes.
“A lot of clients don’t track their expenses at all,” she reveals. “Many hide from the numbers, spend without looking and justify purchases without having a strategy. It’s like someone who wants to diet refusing to get on the scales.”
Expense approvals are often hidden inside individual inboxes, making them difficult to track and audit. And prone to delay. Different managers interpret policies differently, creating inconsistency across the organisation. Spreadsheets are also unreliable. What version are you on? Has the expense already been approved/reimbursed? The larger an organisation becomes, the more fragile these processes become.
“The expense you cannot see is the one you never reclaim,” says Dhillon. “The bigger shift is compliance. Digital record-keeping is already the rule for VAT under Making Tax Digital and is now extending to income tax, so a shoebox of receipts and a manual spreadsheet is quietly becoming a liability, not a saving.
“If you still run expenses by email, move the receipt capture to the point of spend first. The coding, the VAT and the sign-off all get easier once the paperwork stops going missing.”
Since launching her business SaSSy with Sylvie last year, Frankel has used expenses software to unearth duplicate subscriptions, find out when a business has accidentally paid an invoice twice, track down “lots of” keying errors, and help business owners understand when the expenses incurred with a particular revenue stream make it unviable.
“Expense tracking is a vital part of business strategy,” she says. “A lot of businesses are wasting money on unnecessary things. You need software to track expenses, an expense policy so staff know the rules, and digital records of every receipt.”
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Bex Burn-Callander
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