Chances are, that when you ask for a new expense management system, be that to replace an existing system or a manual process, you’ll be met with some variation of the question: ‘How much?’ That is, what’s the literal cost of expense management software, and the cost of implementation.
That’s a fair question, and any provider should be completely transparent about pricing. But price is just one factor.
When finance people request new kit, it’s this debate around cost that most frequently holds up change. But not changing has a cost too, and we have the numbers to show how much manual or slow expense management costs you every single day.
The true cost of expense management software is not what your invoice says each month. It is the sum of three things:
- The subscription fee.
- The hours your team spends processing claims.
- The cashback or card fees you either earn or hand over, depending on which provider you use.
Most companies only look at the first number. The other two are usually bigger, and they are the ones nobody puts on a comparison chart.
That gap between the sticker price and the real cost is where this article lives. We will show you what it looks like in practice, put some numbers against it using a fictional example, and explain where cashback cards change the sum entirely.
The real cost of expense management software
Ask most finance teams what expense management costs and you will get a monthly figure: £8 a head here, £9 a claim there. What you will not hear, unless you ask directly, is how long it takes someone to actually process a claim, chase a missing receipt, or reconcile a stack of credit card transactions at month end.
We have two real examples that show what that time cost looks like once it is measured properly.
- At London Luton Airport, Minhaj Haque in the finance team used to spend 10 to 15 minutes processing a single expense on the airport’s old system. Using Webexpenses, that is now under a minute.
He processes 150 to 200 expenses a month, so that saving compounds fast. Monthly reporting to AENA, the airport’s Spanish owner, used to take him a week. It now takes a fraction of that, and month-end has gone from several days of work to a single day. - At DRP Group, a creative communications agency with a team that is rarely at a desk, the same pattern shows up.
Natalie Parker, DRP’s IT project manager, estimates that submitting a single claim fell from seven or eight minutes on their old system to roughly one minute with Webexpenses. Budget reconciliation, which used to run three to four months behind, is now a clean month-end process with a hard cut-off. That was simply not possible before.
Two very different organisations, an airport and a creative agency, and the same story: a 10 to 15 minute task per claim becomes a one-minute task.
And all this is only the finance team’s side of the ledger. There’s a second clock running elsewhere in the business too. It’s harder to put a number on, but the time employees lose manually submitting expenses, or going back and forth with you over a queried claim, is money lost as well.
Add it up across a whole team, and the total climbs fast. It’s worth counting alongside your own time when you build the case.
Do the maths on your own team
Using these examples, we can put together a pretty accurate working example. We have built a fictional company, and shown what the time saving looks like at three different sizes: a small team of 10 expense claimants, a mid-sized team of 50, and a larger team of 200.
To build this, we have used two assumptions, both deliberately conservative:
- First, that each claimant submits two expenses a month on average.
- Second, that switching from a slow, manual process to Webexpenses saves around nine minutes per claim, based on the average reduction seen at Luton and DRP, at a blended staff cost of £25 an hour.
For the cashback, we have also assumed an average card spend of £250 per claimant per month, and applied the 0.75% cashback rate available on Webexpenses cards, which is uncapped and unlimited.
| Claimants | Claims a month | Time saved a year | Labour cost saved a year* | Card spend a year | Cashback earned a year** | Combined value a year |
| 10 (small team) | 20 | 36 hours | £900 | £30,000 | £225 | £1,125 |
| 50 (mid-sized team) | 100 | 180 hours | £4,500 | £150,000 | £1,125 | £5,625 |
| 200 (larger team) | 400 | 720 hours | £18,000 | £600,000 | £4,500 | £22,500 |
*Based on nine minutes saved per claim at £25 an hour. Your own numbers will depend on how complex your claims are and what your team is paid.
**Based on 0.75% cashback on Webexpenses cards, assuming £250 of card spend per claimant, per month.
Even the small team saves the equivalent of a working week a year, plus a modest amount of cashback that would otherwise go nowhere. At 200 claimants, the combined figure edges past £22,000 a year. None of that shows up on the invoice, and none of it shows up if you only compare providers on price per user.
You can run your own numbers through our ROI calculator if you want a figure specific to your team.
The card fee you don’t have to pay
Our cashback cards are where the maths gets interesting, because not every provider treats them the same way.
Some card-led providers, Pleo being the best-known example, charge per card, regardless of whether that card gets used that month. If someone holds a card and does not spend on it, you are still paying for it.
With Webexpenses cards, the model runs the other way. You get up to 0.75% cashback on every transaction, uncapped and unlimited, and the cards are free to use. There is no subscription ceiling that caps how much you can earn back.
Route more spend through the cards, and you earn more. It means a card programme can pay you back rather than simply sitting on your books as another line item.
London Luton Airport is a good real-world example of this in motion. The finance team is currently piloting Webexpenses cards with one director, ahead of a wider rollout to replace their existing Barclaycard.
Two things drew them to the switch: cashback on every transaction, and the chance to cut the monthly card fees that come with a traditional provider.
If you are weighing up whether to make a similar move, starting with one frequent traveller and comparing the cashback and reporting against what you currently pay is a sensible way to test the water before extending it further.
Why teams move to Webexpenses
Once you add up the time saved and the cashback earned, the case for switching is rarely about the software alone. It is about what the software lets your team stop doing.
Webexpenses reads receipts and suggests a category based on your own past claims, getting sharper the more it is used, so nobody on your team has to sit and manually code every line.
Claims can be built and submitted from a phone as spend happens, rather than reconstructed from a pile of receipts a week later. Credit card transactions feed directly into the platform, so approvers can see and sign off spend as it happens instead of waiting for a statement to land.
Support matters here too, and it is worth being specific rather than vague about it. Admins get a real person by default, based in the UK during the day and in Australia overnight, so there is always someone awake to help.
Pricing runs on an agreed number of active users, with overage to cover those odd busy months. So you are not paying full price for accounts that sit dormant most of the time.
Carbon tracking for car, rail and air travel is included as standard, which matters more each year as UK reporting requirements shift.
And if cashback cards are not right for your team yet, the platform works just as well with reimbursement or your existing third-party cards. Nothing about switching to Webexpenses requires you to change how your team pays for things on day one.
If the numbers above look close to your own business, the fastest way to see what they mean for you specifically is to talk to us directly.
Book a demo with Webexpenses and we’ll walk through what the true cost of your current process looks like, and what changes once you move it onto ours.
