The Disconnects
Expense management should be simple. Employees spend money, the company records it, accounting reconciles it, and life moves on. Yet, in reality, it is one of the most frustratingly inefficient processes inside a company.
Why? Because of the disconnects.
Every CFO knows the drill: mismatched receipts, incomplete expense forms, endless card statements, and the time lag that turns what should be routine into chaos. These gaps may look small in isolation, but together they slow down reporting, frustrate employees, and distort financial visibility.
The Triad: Receipts, Expense Forms, and Card Statements
At the heart of the problem is the broken triangle between what employees spend, what they report, and what the bank confirms.
Receipts
In theory, every purchase should come with a receipt. In practice:
Employees forget to ask.
Paper gets lost or fades.
Digital copies are incomplete or unreadable.
The result? A missing link between what was spent and what the company must pay.
Expense Forms
Employees then fill out expense forms — manually. They enter merchants, amounts, accounts, cost centers. But manual entry is fragile:
Wrong merchant names.
Wrong amounts.
Missing or misclassified cost allocations.
Even the most diligent employees rarely match receipts and forms perfectly. For everyone else, it’s guesswork for accounting.
Card Statements
Finally come the statements — one per card. Reconciling them with incomplete forms and scattered receipts is a marathon. And because receipts and forms arrive late and with gaps, finance ends up patching the process together long after the money has left the bank.
When time is Money
Perhaps the most damaging gap is time.
Expenses happen instantly, but they surface in the books only weeks later — after submissions, reminders, corrections, and reconciliations. This delay blinds the CFO to real-time cash outflows. It prevents quick action to control spending, reallocating budgets, or forecasting accurately.
At worst, companies discover too late that unrecorded expenses have eaten into cash reserves, strained liquidity, or derailed plans.
And as interest rates remain high, money outside has a real cost which companies with thin margins could certainly do without.
The Cost of Standing Still
Expense management should not absorb disproportionate effort or introduce unnecessary risk. Yet the disconnects between receipts, forms, statements, and timing remain entrenched in most organizations.
For the CFO, these are not administrative inconveniences. They are structural weaknesses. They delay visibility, compromise compliance, and weaken trust in the numbers. And as organizations grow, these weaknesses scale with them.
The conclusion is clear: expense management is not a minor process to tolerate, but a critical control point. Companies that address the disconnects will gain accuracy, agility, and confidence. Those that don’t will continue to operate with blurred financial visibility.
