Enterprise expense management: A comprehensive guide for finance teams
- Introduction
- What is enterprise expense management?
- The top benefits of expense management for enterprises
- Key challenges in enterprise expense management
- Best practices for managing expenses at an enterprise level
- What should an enterprise expense policy include?
- Integrating expense management with corporate cards and payments
- Enterprise expense management metrics you should measure
- Emerging trends in 2025 for enterprise expense management
- How to implement an enterprise expense management program
- Key features to look for in enterprise expense management
- Manage costs and drive compliance with the right expense management software
Eliminate expense reports.
Introduction
For finance teams at large companies, managing expenses involves more than approving reimbursements. Expense management includes controlling costs, ensuring compliance, and maintaining financial visibility at scale across teams and spending categories. Travel and entertainment alone represents the second-largest indirect expense for most companies after payroll, according to Mastercard, making expense management a critical business function.
Enterprises face challenges that make traditional expense processes inadequate. Growing expense volumes, decentralized spending driven by distributed teams, and increasing scrutiny over costs require updated approaches. As a result, modernizing expense management automation should be a strategic priority rather than an operational afterthought.
This article covers the importance of enterprise expense management, common challenges, proven best practices, essential tools, and emerging trends. You'll learn how to improve your expense management processes, implement expense policies, and use technology to transform expense management from a reactive task into a proactive tool for better financial performance.
What is enterprise expense management?
Enterprise expense management refers to the policies and processes organizations use to control, track, and optimize spending related to employee and operational expenses. This includes travel and entertainment, employee reimbursements, business credit card transactions, departmental discretionary purchases, and incidental spending tied to business operations.
Unlike small and medium-sized businesses, large enterprises manage complex expense processes across multiple regions, currencies, teams, and regulatory requirements. On top of that, these organizations typically handle decentralized spending, high transaction volumes, and stricter audit requirements, making real-time oversight necessary for financial control.
The top benefits of expense management for enterprises
Strategic expense management helps establish your financial health. When implemented properly, it protects profit margins, reduces operational inefficiencies, and creates the visibility finance teams need to make strategic decisions.
Better profit margins and cash flow
Unmanaged or poorly managed expenses directly impact profit margins and strain cash flow. When these costs lack proper oversight, organizations can exceed budgets that impact their bottom line.
Controlling expense costs helps protect your business’s profitability as each dollar saved through better expense management improves profits. Companies with strong expense controls can redirect savings toward growth initiatives, technology investments, or competitive advantages that drive long-term value.
Cash flow also improves when expenses are managed proactively rather than reactively. Real-time visibility into spending patterns allows finance teams to forecast cash needs more accurately and avoid unexpected outlays that strain working capital.
Cost control and overspending
A strong expense management process prevents overspending and eliminates wasteful spending across your business. Controls ensure all spending is approved, within budget, and necessary for business operations. This systematic approach to cost reduction helps companies maintain financial discipline even as they scale.
Without proper controls, expenses can quickly increase beyond budgeted amounts. Employees may make purchases that seem reasonable when evaluated individually, but collectively they exceed departmental budgets. Clear expense approval processes and spending limits prevent these scenarios while still allowing necessary business activities to continue.
Transparency
Expense management establishes transparency into where money flows in and out throughout your business. This visibility shows the expenses by departments, projects, or activities, enabling informed decisions about resource allocation and budget planning.
Detailed business expense tracking software shows spending patterns that might otherwise remain hidden. Finance teams can identify departments consistently exceeding budgets, projects with unexpectedly high costs, or categories where spending has been increasing without any clear justification. This creates accountability across the organization as managers become more conscious of their teams' spending habits.
This visibility also supports strategic planning. When finance leaders understand historical spending patterns by category and department, they can create more accurate budgets and identify opportunities to reduce costs without impacting business performance.
Employee satisfaction
Clear expense policies and efficient processes ensure fair reimbursement and consistent treatment of employees. When expense management works well, employees receive fast reimbursements and understand exactly what expenses are covered. On the other hand, poor expense processes frustrate employees when they need to cover business costs for extended periods while waiting for reimbursement. Unclear policies can also lead to rejected expense reports and disagreements about what qualifies for reimbursement.
Companies with streamlined expense reimbursement processes see higher employee satisfaction scores and reduced administrative burden on both employees and finance teams. When the process is simple and predictable, employees can focus on their core responsibilities rather than navigating complex expense procedures and corporate travel budgets.
Regulatory compliance
Proper expense management helps companies comply with tax laws and regulatory requirements. By maintaining detailed documentation and audit trails for expenses, your business can comply with IRS requirements for business deductions and meet other compliance standards for financial reporting.
Non-compliance with expense regulations can result in significant penalties, rejected tax deductions, and audit complications. Without proper expense documentation, your business can lose valuable deductions during tax preparation or face challenges during regulatory audits.
The best expense reporting platforms automatically capture the necessary documentation for compliance, including receipts, business purpose explanations, and proper categorization. This approach reduces compliance risk and supports accurate financial reporting across the organization.
Key challenges in enterprise expense management
Managing expenses at an enterprise scale presents significant challenges that can undermine performance. These pain points highlight why traditional expense management approaches can fail in large organizations.
Manual processes and inefficiency
There are enterprises that still rely on spreadsheets, emails, or paper-based processes for expense reporting. This is both labor-intensive and error-prone, creating bottlenecks that only worsen as companies grow.
According to the Global Business Travel Association, an average expense report takes approximately 20 minutes to complete and costs around $58 to process. And the situation becomes even more costly when errors occur: nearly one in five reports contains mistakes, adding rework time and an additional $52 in processing costs to fix each error.
These inefficiencies add up quickly across large businesses. If 1,000 employees submit just one expense report in a given month, that adds up to over 330 hours of employee time spent on expense reporting alone, not including the finance team's processing time. Manual data entry, physical receipt handling, and email-based approval chains slow down this process and pull employees away from more impactful work.
The scalability problem becomes apparent as organizations grow. Manual processes that work for 50 employees become unmanageable for 500 or 5,000, yet many companies continue using these outdated methods due to resistance to change or lack of investment in expense management tools.
Delayed reporting
Fragmented and slow expense processes prevent finance teams from gaining real-time visibility into company spending. When employees delay filing expenses due to time-consuming processes, managers face month-end surprises and lose the ability to track budgets in real time. Delays can also make it difficult to remember business purposes or match transactions to specific projects.
These delays create blind spots in spending oversight, preventing finance teams from being able to make informed decisions about operating budgets when expense data arrives weeks after the actual spending occurred. Department managers struggle to control costs when they don't know their current spending levels until expense reports are finally processed.
Policy non-compliance
Without clear, up-to-date policies and easy enforcement mechanisms, your expense management process can quickly run into issues. This lack of clear guidance can lead to confusion about what expenses are reimbursable, appropriate spending limits, and required documentation. Employees make assumptions about policy compliance, often resulting in rejected expense reports and disputes between staff and finance teams.
When policies do exist but aren't enforced consistently, employees may test boundaries by submitting questionable expenses. Without systematic policy enforcement, compliance depends on manual review by finance staff who may miss violations or apply rules inconsistently.
The compliance problem worsens when policies aren't updated regularly to reflect changing business needs, cost inflation, or new expense categories. Outdated policies create gaps that employees exploit, whether intentionally or accidentally, leading to increased costs and audit risks.
Fraud and abuse risks
Expense fraud is an ever-present risk for enterprises, including fake receipts, inflated claims, and duplicate submissions. Decentralized expense management processes make it difficult to spot patterns like duplicate receipts across different departments or suspiciously frequent small-dollar claims designed to avoid scrutiny.
According to The Institute of Financial Operations and Leadership, 44% of finance teams globally report knowing someone who experienced accounts payable fraud within the past three years. Expense fraud may be more widespread than many organizations realize, often going undetected due to inadequate controls and oversight.
Employees may submit personal expenses as business costs, inflate actual expenses, create fake receipts, or submit the same expense multiple times across different reports or time periods. Without proper controls and audit trails, these activities can happen over and over before detection.
Integration and data silos
Legacy expense management processes often fail to integrate with other platforms like your ERP or accounting automation software. This disconnection causes duplicate data entry, reconciliation challenges, and delays in financial reporting.
When expense data remains isolated from other interfaces, finance teams must manually transfer information between platforms. This process is time-consuming, error-prone, and prevents real-time financial reporting. When expenses don’t automatically flow into general ledger entries or financial reports, month-end close becomes a time-consuming task rather than an ongoing process
Disconnected data creates blind spots in spend analysis. When expense data sits separate from procurement, accounts payable, and other financial information, companies miss opportunities to identify spending patterns, negotiate better vendor terms, or optimize their overall cost structure.
Best practices for managing expenses at an enterprise level
Addressing the challenges of enterprise expense management combines technology, clear policies, and organizational alignment. These proven practices help finance teams create expense processes that are proactive tools for financial control and business insight.
Automate and streamline processes
Technology can help eliminate the manual work that slows down and introduces errors in the expense processes. Replacing spreadsheet and paper-based reporting with dedicated expense management software accelerates tasks like receipt capture, data entry, and approval routing.
Integrated optical character recognition (OCR) technology allows employees to photograph receipts with mobile apps, automatically extracting and categorizing transaction data for review. This automation dramatically reduces processing costs.
Integration capabilities are also critical for improving efficiency. The best expense management software should connect directly with accounting and ERP software so approved expenses flow into the general ledger without manual data entry. This real-time synchronization improves accuracy while reducing the time finance teams spend on data transfer and reconciliation.
Mobile accessibility also ensures employees and managers can submit and approve expenses from anywhere, accelerating approval cycles and reducing delays. When the entire process operates digitally, companies can track expenses in real time rather than waiting for monthly reports.
Establish clear expense policies
Comprehensive written expense policies form the foundation of expense management. This policy should detail reimbursable expenses, spending limits by category, approval hierarchies, receipt requirements, and submission deadlines. The policy also needs to be easily accessible to all employees through company materials, onboarding resources, and regular communications. Clear communication prevents confusion about what expenses qualify for reimbursement and the documentation that’s required.
However, creating a policy is only the first step. In order for it to be effective, your policies also need to be enforced. The best corporate cards have embedded expense management features that can prevent out-of-policy expenses, shifting compliance from reactive problem-solving to proactive prevention.
Implement efficient approval workflows
Streamlined approval processes prevent expenses from sitting in managers' inboxes for weeks. Clear workflows should specify approval requirements based on expense amounts, categories, and organizational hierarchy. Low-value routine expenses might be automatically approved or require only one manager's sign-off, while larger or exceptional expenses go to department heads or finance directors.
Digital workflows can notify appropriate approvers instantly and send automated reminders about requests. Intelligent routing based on organizational structure or project codes reduces the administrative burden on finance teams while allowing for each expense to have the proper oversight.
Workflows also create audit trails that provide accountability and visibility, as managers can monitor their teams' pending expenses, while finance can identify bottlenecks and intervene when reports get stuck in the approval process. This transparency helps maintain reasonable processing times and employee satisfaction.
Foster cross-department collaboration
While finance leads expense management, implementing a successful program requires input and cooperation from across the organization. IT departments help select and implement technology solutions, operations teams provide insights into business requirements, and HR supports policy communication and training.
C-suite collaboration can also become important, with CFOs partnering with CIOs and CTOs to choose technology that aligns with broader digital strategies. This cross-functional approach ensures expense management supports company-wide goals rather than operating in isolation.
Employee training and feedback can make a difference as well. Providing clear instructions on policy requirements and software usage reduces errors and improves adoption. Regular feedback sessions with frequent travelers and department leaders can identify process improvements and address pain points before they become widespread problems.
Monitor, analyze, and audit regularly
Data-driven monitoring allows you to continuously improve expense management processes. Finance teams should track key metrics including average processing time, policy violation rates, and spending trends by category and department. Regular analysis can reveal patterns that inform strategic decisions, such as renegotiating vendor contracts when travel costs consistently exceed budgets.
The monitoring process should create a feedback loop where insights inform policy updates, training programs, and other improvements. If data shows frequent late submissions in specific departments, targeted training or process adjustments can address the root causes. This oversight ensures expense management processes remain effective as organizations grow and evolve.
What should an enterprise expense policy include?
A detailed enterprise expense policy provides rules and structure for what employees can spend, how to submit expenses, and the documentation that’s required with each expense. This policy sets spending expectations and enforces company-wide consistency, making it a critical component of financial control.
First, a great expense policy clearly distinguishes between reimbursable and non-reimbursable expenses. Reimbursable expenses typically include business travel, client meals, professional development, and necessary equipment purchases. Non-reimbursable items often cover personal expenses, entertainment unrelated to business, and excessive or luxury purchases that exceed reasonable business standards.
Spending limits by category and employee role help control costs while providing clear guidance. For example, sales teams might have a budget for client entertainment, while executives may have different travel class requirements within a corporate travel policy. Hotel caps should reflect local market rates in different cities, and home office expense limits should account for remote work needs.
Documentation and timeline requirements form another essential component. The policy should specify when original receipts are required versus when credit card statements suffice, what business purpose explanations need to include, and how to handle missing expense receipts. Additionally, employees should understand deadlines for submitting expenses, typically within 30 to 60 days of incurrence, while the company should commit to specific reimbursement timeframes to maintain employee satisfaction.
For expenses that need approvals, be sure to build multi-step approval workflows that reflect organizational hierarchy and expense amounts. The policy should outline which expenses require manager approval, when department heads must review spending, and what circumstances trigger finance team involvement. Exception handling procedures help address out-of-policy requests without derailing the entire process.
Finally, policies should be updated at least annually and communicated through onboarding programs, regular training sessions, and accessible reference materials. Regular updates ensure policies remain relevant to changing business needs, cost inflation, and evolving expense categories while maintaining awareness and accountability across the organization.
Integrating expense management with corporate cards and payments
Linking corporate card programs directly to your expense management enables real-time visibility, automated compliance, and faster expense reconciliation. Real-time transaction data ingestion means expenses appear in your platform immediately after purchase, eliminating delays between spending and reporting. And since instant receipt capture and automatic receipt matching connect transaction data with supporting documentation, manual effort is reduced from both employees and finance teams.
Top platforms use merchant codes and AI models to categorize expenses automatically, reducing the time spent on manual classification while improving accuracy. This automated categorization ensures consistent expense coding across your business and reduces the risk of misclassified transactions affecting financial reporting.
Rather than discovering policy violations weeks later while reviewing expense reports, cards integrated with expense management features can flag personal or excessive charges immediately when they occur. These cards can be embedded with controls that limit spend by cardholder, merchant type, location, or category. These configurations enforce policy at the moment of purchase rather than retroactively during reimbursement. For example, finance teams can set daily spending limits for individual employees, block certain merchant categories entirely, or restrict international transactions for specific cardholders.
Integrated platforms automatically process transactions with supporting documentation, categorization, and general ledger codes attached, reducing errors and manual work. This automated documentation ensures every expense is in compliance for audit purposes while maintaining consistent coding for financial reporting.
With proper implementation, these corporate cards can eliminate the need for employee reimbursements. Since charges are paid directly by the company, employees don't need to cover business costs with personal funds while waiting for reimbursement. This model improves employee satisfaction while simplifying cash flow management for the organization.
Integration serves as a foundational enabler of automation, compliance, and transparency across the entire expense management process. When corporate cards and expense platforms work together seamlessly, businesses can implement effective enterprise expense management.
Enterprise expense management metrics you should measure
To evaluate your success, finance leaders need to track operational, compliance, and financial metrics that reflect both process performance and policy effectiveness. These metrics provide the data needed to optimize expense management processes and demonstrate value to organizational leadership.
Operational efficiency
Evaluating how well the expense process operates helps identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. Start with considering the time from submission to reimbursement, which reflects process efficiency and employee satisfaction levels. Organizations with efficient processes can have reimbursement cycles of five to seven business days.
The average number of touchpoints per report can also reveal process complexity and automation opportunities. Manual processes can require five to ten touchpoints, while automated platforms can reduce this to two or three. Tracking the percentage of reports submitted on time allows you to determine policy compliance and if there are process usability issues that may require additional training or improvements.
Mobile submission rates and automatic transaction matching percentages indicate technology adoption and the operational efficiency of your platform. Higher mobile usage typically correlates with faster submission times and better employee satisfaction, while automatic matching reduces manual data entry and improves accuracy.
Compliance and accuracy
Metrics evaluating how well your team follows policies can help you understand how well employees follow expense guidelines and where additional training may be needed. The percentage of reports flagged for policy violations should decrease as processes improve and employees become more familiar with requirements.
The ratio of manual versus auto-approved transactions shows how well policies align with actual spending patterns and your platform’s capabilities. Higher auto-approval rates generally indicate better policy design and configuration, leading to faster processing and reduced administrative burden. Along with considering auto-approval rates, consider audit exception rates to measure post-payment discrepancies discovered during internal or external audits. Low exception rates demonstrate strong controls and accurate reporting, while high rates may indicate policy gaps or software configuration issues that require attention.
Financial impact
Financial metrics show the business value of expense management investments and help justify improving your processes. Total spend by category, region, or business unit provides visibility into expense patterns and helps identify optimization opportunities before and after implementation.
Track spend reduction trends following policy changes or implementations to demonstrate the financial impact of expense management improvements. Successful initiatives often generate cost savings within the first year through better policy compliance and reduced processing costs.
Finance teams should review these metrics quarterly and use trends to adjust workflows, improve processes, update policies, or train employees. Rather than just being performance reports, these metrics should function as tools for continuous improvement that enable finance teams to proactively control costs.
Emerging trends in 2025 for enterprise expense management
Enterprise expense management is evolving quickly as organizations adapt to changing work patterns, economic pressure, and technological advances. These emerging trends are reshaping how companies approach spending oversight and financial control.
AI and machine learning
AI expense management is allowing expense processing to go from a manual administrative task into an intelligent, data-driven function. Machine learning algorithms now provide predictive coding that learns from historical data to categorize new expenses automatically while also powering advanced fraud detection capabilities that identify suspicious spending patterns human reviewers might miss. These platforms can flag identical receipts submitted by different employees, detect expenses that consistently fall just under approval limits, or identify unusual vendor relationships that may indicate fraudulent activity.
AI-driven recommendations can help businesses optimize their expense policies based on actual usage patterns and cost trends. Rather than relying on static policies, companies can now use machine learning insights to adjust spending limits, identify cost-saving opportunities, and predict future expense needs with greater accuracy. The technology extends to automated accounting processes that use AI to assign general ledger codes, match receipts to transactions, and flag potential compliance issues before they require manual intervention.
Mobile-first and remote work adaptation
Hybrid and remote work models require expense management solutions that function seamlessly regardless of where an employee is located. Financial management tools now prioritize mobile accessibility, allowing employees to submit expenses and managers to approve requests from anywhere.
Mobile apps also eliminate the need for physical receipt storage by enabling instant photo capture and automatic data extraction. Employees can submit expenses immediately after purchases, reducing the risk of lost receipts and improving data accuracy while the transaction details remain fresh.
Remote work has also changed expense categories and policies. Companies have new frameworks for recurring expenses like home office equipment, internet allowances, and co-working space memberships, while travel and expense management policies can be adapted to reflect unique travel patterns.
Strategic expense management (C-suite focus)
Expense management has evolved from a back-office function to a strategic initiative that every executive pays attention to. As a result, expense and spend management software can be viewed as part of a financial strategy rather than just operational tools.
C-suite collaboration may be necessary, with CFOs partnering with CTOs and CIOs to find software solutions that align with broader goals. This executive involvement ensures expense management initiatives support company-wide objectives around efficiency, compliance, and financial visibility. For instance, sustainability considerations are also beginning to influence expense decisions, with some organizations tracking the carbon footprint of business travel and incorporating environmental impact into their expense approval processes.
Policy evolution with economic climate
Revisiting expense policies with greater frequency can become more necessary in response to economic uncertainties. Rather than implementing across-the-board cuts, organizations can use data analytics to identify specific areas where spending can be optimized without impacting business performance. Inflation adjustments may also need to be more dynamic, with companies needing to update meal allowances, hotel caps, and other expense limits more frequently to reflect changing cost structures in different markets.
Overall, companies preparing for the future may consider shifting from purely cost-cutting approaches to strategic cost management that uses spending data to identify opportunities for reinvestment. By analyzing expense patterns, organizations can find savings in low-value activities and redirect those resources toward growth initiatives and competitive advantages.
How to implement an enterprise expense management program
To implement or upgrade an enterprise expense management program, you’ll need to take a systematic approach that addresses technology, processes, and organizational change. With this step-by-step framework, finance teams can build expense management processes that deliver impactful changes.
Step 1: Assess current state
Start by reviewing your existing expense management process and expense policies to identify specific pain points and inefficiencies. Document how employees currently submit expenses, track approval workflows, and measure processing times from submission to reimbursement. This assessment should reveal whether your organization still relies on spreadsheets, email-based approvals, or paper receipts.
Gather baseline metrics including average processing time, error rates, policy compliance levels, and processing costs per report. Surveying employees and managers about their experience with the current processes can help you understand frustration points and workflow challenges.
Step 2: Define goals and requirements
Establish clear and measurable objectives for your expense management program. Common goals include reducing processing time, improving policy compliance rates, decreasing processing costs, or increasing employee satisfaction scores. Targets help justify the investment and allow you to measure success after implementation.
Involve stakeholders from finance, IT, operations, and key departments to identify technical and functional requirements for your new software solution. Consider integration needs with existing accounting systems, security requirements for financial data, scalability for future growth, and usability standards that will drive employee adoption.
Step 3: Update policy and procedures
Before implementing new technology, ensure your expense policy is comprehensive and current. Create clear guidelines for reimbursable expenses, spending limits, approval hierarchies, documentation requirements, and submission deadlines. Be sure to lean on your legal and compliance teams to ensure policies meet regulatory requirements and audit standards.
Make a plan for how policy changes will be communicated throughout the organization. Develop training materials, update employee handbooks, and schedule information sessions to ensure all employees understand new requirements before the launch.
Step 4: Choose the right tools
Evaluate expense management solutions based on your business’s needs and organizational goals. Look for platforms that offer the automation capabilities, integration options, and scalability needed to support your business. Key features should include mobile accessibility, receipt capture technology, automated approval workflows, and robust reporting capabilities.
Look for expense management software that integrates spend controls with corporate cards, enabling real-time policy enforcement and automated compliance checking. The best platforms combine expense reporting with spend management capabilities, providing comprehensive financial visibility and control.
Step 5: Implementation and training
Plan a phased rollout that starts with a pilot group before expanding. This single department or location can test workflows, identify issues, and gather feedback that can inform broader implementation. This approach reduces risk and allows for adjustments before full deployment.
As a part of this process, develop comprehensive training programs for both employees and managers. Employees need to understand how to use new submission processes, mobile applications, and policy requirements. Managers require training on approval workflows, budget monitoring capabilities, and exception handling procedures. Be sure to also create user guides, video tutorials, and reference materials that employees can access when they need help.
Step 6: Monitor and iterate
Track the success metrics established in your goal-setting phase to measure how successful your program is. Monitor processing times, error rates, policy compliance, and user satisfaction scores to find areas that may need additional attention or training. In this phase, you can take advantage of the reporting capabilities of your expense management software to analyze spending patterns and identify optimization opportunities. Regular analysis can reveal trends that inform policy updates, budget adjustments, or process improvements.
Establish a feedback loop that incorporates input from employees, managers, and finance teams. Monthly or quarterly reviews help identify emerging issues and opportunities for continuous improvement.
Key features to look for in enterprise expense management
Finance teams should prioritize features that are the most impactful to their current processes when evaluating enterprise expense management tools. These capabilities represent some of the most important features that can deliver measurable operational improvements.
Automated receipt matching
Enterprise expense management software uses OCR and AI to capture and link receipts to transactions automatically. Employees can submit photos or email receipts, and the software extracts key details including vendor names, amounts, and dates before matching them to the correct transactions. As a result, how to keep track of business expenses becomes much more efficient when receipt tracking is automated and auditable rather than relying on manual filing processes.
Dynamic spend controls
Dynamic controls allow administrators to set specific spending limits by user, category, or project in line with budgets. These controls automatically enforce policy in real time rather than after expenses have been incurred. Spending thresholds can vary by employee role, department, or purpose. Look for platforms that can block or flag excess spending before it occurs, preventing budget overruns and creating a more structured, accountable spending environment without requiring micromanagement.
Real-time policy enforcement
Expense policies can now be enforced instantly at the point of transaction. These software solutions automatically detect and block out-of-policy purchases such as those exceeding set limits or involving unauthorized vendors. If a transaction breaches established rules, it can be declined or flagged immediately for review. This proactive approach means policy compliance is no longer dependent on after-the-fact audits that may discover violations weeks or months later.
Automated approval workflows
Expense approval workflows can be automated, reducing manual review and speeding up processing. Low-risk or in-policy expenses can be auto-approved, while higher-value or flagged transactions are routed to the appropriate approver based on predetermined criteria. Workflows can be customized by department or spending category, and digital routing reduces delays compared to email-based approval processes. Expense claim processing becomes faster and more predictable when workflows operate automatically according to established business rules and organizational hierarchy.
Real-time budget tracking
Live budget tracking gives managers visibility into spending as it happens, not weeks later. Finance teams can monitor actual spending against set budgets by project, department, or cost center, with tools updating budget utilization continuously as expenses process. This real-time visibility allows teams to spot overages early and adjust spending before problems occur. This functionality also supports mid-cycle decision-making such as pausing non-essential spending or reallocating funds between categories.
Accounting integration and automatic reconciliation
The right software connects directly to your accounting platform or ERP, reducing manual reconciliation work. Once an expense is approved, the software automatically syncs transaction data, GL codes, and documentation to your company's accounting system. This automation reduces time spent on journal entries, lowers error rates, and helps teams close books faster.
Manage costs and drive compliance with the right expense management software
Strategic enterprise expense management protects profits, improves compliance, and streamlines operations. Yet, the traditional approach of manual processes and reactive oversight doesn’t achieve that for most companies. This approach creates bottlenecks and exposes companies to compliance risks and fraud.
Success requires a strategic approach that combines technology adoption with policy enforcement and organizational change management. Finance teams that modernize their expense management processes gain real-time visibility into spending patterns while reducing administrative burden and improving employee satisfaction. This proactive approach transforms expense management from a cost center into a source of financial insight and competitive advantage.
Brex's expense management software is designed to handle the scale and complexity that large organizations face. The platform combines corporate cards with expense management capabilities, enabling real-time spend controls, automated policy enforcement, and seamless accounting integration that eliminates manual reconciliation work. Brex's AI-powered receipt matching and automated approval workflows allows finance teams to process expense reports up to 8x faster.
With features like dynamic spend controls, real-time budget tracking, and comprehensive reporting, Brex allows finance leaders to maintain financial visibility and control without sacrificing operational efficiency. The platform's integration capabilities connect directly with existing accounting and ERP platforms, ensuring expense data flows automatically into financial records while supporting faster month-end closes and more accurate financial reporting.
For DoorDash, consolidating multiple card solutions into Brex's unified platform gave the business real-time visibility across global spending while reducing reimbursement times from weeks to four days or less.
“Traditional expense management requires you to chase money after it's been spent,” Josh says. “Brex enables you to do the opposite — we’re clear about how money is being spent from the get-go.” Jerome Barley, Head of Global Travel & Expense at DoorDash, agrees: “The transparency that Brex provides our team is unparalleled. Our finance partners are ecstatic to be able to see how spend is trending at any point in time. We don’t get that with our legacy systems.”
Get a demo of Brex to see how you can streamline your enterprise expense management software.
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Learn how our spend platform can increase the strategic impact of your finance team and future-proof your company.