Excel is brilliant. Let’s be clear about that from the start. It’s been the backbone of finance teams for decades, and for good reason. It’s flexible, familiar, and when you’re starting out or running a lean operation, it absolutely does the job. No one’s going to argue with that.
But here’s the thing: Excel-based expense management has limits. And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve already bumped into a few of them.
Maybe it’s the chaos when someone’s off sick and you can’t find the ‘right’ version of the spreadsheet. Maybe it’s the hours spent chasing receipts or the growing unease about whether everything’s compliant. Or perhaps it’s just the nagging feeling that there must be a better way.
We’re not here to tell you Excel is rubbish. We’re here to help you figure out whether you’ve reached the point where the returns start to diminish, and a purpose-built tool might actually save you time, money and a fair bit of stress.
What Excel does well (and why you’re probably still using it)
It’s part of the furniture now, but there was a time when Excel was sexy and quite revolutionary. This classic Excel ad from 1990 says it all: two Wall Street lackeys conjuring up spreadsheets on the fly in the lift ride up to see a scary boss. This was cutting-edge stuff.
These days, Excel has gone beyond even mass adoption. It’s ubiquitous. Open any computer and it’s already there.
You don’t need to get budget approval, go through procurement or convince anyone that you need it. Your team already knows how to use it, more or less. And when your business is small, setting up a simple spreadsheet to track expenses feels perfectly sensible.
It’s also incredibly flexible. Need to add a column? Done. Want to create a custom formula? Go ahead. That Swiss Army knife quality makes it feel like you can solve just about any problem if you’re clever enough with formulas.
The problem with Excel, however, is that as your business grows that flexibility becomes a liability.
What started as a simple solution becomes a tangled mess of tabs, macros and workarounds. And while you might be fluent in the mysteries of the labyrinthine spreadsheet you’ve created, chances are it’s inscrutable to everyone else.
Where the cracks start to show
Version control becomes a nightmare
This is usually the first thing that goes wrong. Someone emails you ‘Expenses_March_FINAL.xlsx’, but then another version arrives called ‘Expenses_March_FINAL_v2.xlsx’, and before you know it, you’ve got five different spreadsheets floating around and no one’s entirely sure which one is the master copy.
When Sarah in sales updates her copy and Tom in operations updates his, whose expenses actually made it into the final submission? You end up wasting time reconciling versions, hunting down duplicates and hoping you haven’t missed anything important.
Manual data entry eats your time
Every expense claim in Excel requires someone to type in the date, the amount, the category and the description. Then someone else needs to check it. Then it needs to be entered into your accounting system. That’s three touches for every single transaction.
Multiply that by dozens or hundreds of expenses each month, and you’re looking at hours of manual work. It’s just admin. Pure, mind-numbing admin.
And let’s not forget the errors. A misplaced decimal point, a wrong category, a date in the wrong format. These mistakes are inevitable when humans are manually copying data from one place to another. Then you spend more time finding and fixing them.
Receipt management is chaos
Where do your receipts live? Stuck in someone’s wallet? Photographed and living in a random folder on their phone? Emailed to finance with the subject line ‘Receipt’ and no other context?
Excel can track the numbers, but it can’t help with the physical (or digital) paper trail. So you end up with a two-system problem: the spreadsheet has the data, but the receipts are somewhere else entirely. When audit time rolls around, or when someone queries an expense from three months ago, you’re left scrambling.
Policy enforcement is impossible
You can highlight cells in red or add a comment saying ‘Please check company policy’, but Excel won’t actually stop anyone from claiming something they shouldn’t. It can’t flag a duplicate claim, warn someone when they’re about to breach a spending limit or automatically escalate an unusual transaction to a manager.
Your expense policies only work if people remember them and follow them. That’s a lot to ask, especially when staff are busy or new to the company.
Approval workflows don’t exist
With Excel, approval tends to mean someone looks at the spreadsheet and says ‘Yeah, that looks fine’. There’s no formal audit trail showing who approved what, when they approved it or whether they actually reviewed it properly.
If you need multiple levels of approval, or if approvers are away on holiday, things grind to a halt. There’s no automatic routing, no reminders and no way to track where a claim is stuck in the process. Just more emails asking ‘Have you looked at this yet?’ Indeed, many businesses actually have specific expense inboxes just to manage the influx of emails.
Reporting takes forever
Want to know how much you spent on train travel last quarter? You’ll need to filter by category, hope everyone categorised things consistently (they didn’t) and then probably export to another sheet to view potentially incorrect data.
Need to compare spending across departments? Better hope the department names are spelled the same way in every row. Finance want a breakdown by cost centre? Good luck if people have been inconsistent with their coding.
What should take minutes ends up taking hours, because you’re cleaning data instead of analysing it.
Compliance and audit trails are sketchy
You need to be able to show a clear trail from expense claim to approval, to payment. With Excel, that trail is scattered across email threads, chat messages and people’s memories of who said what in a meeting three months ago.
There’s no automatic timestamp showing when changes were made, who made them or what they changed. If something looks dodgy and you need to investigate, you’re relying on detective work rather than system logs.
Scaling is painful
Here’s the brutal truth: the system that worked when you had 10 employees is buckling now you’ve got 50. And it’ll be completely unmanageable at 100.
Every new person means more rows, more potential for errors and more time spent on admin. But unlike your revenue (hopefully), your finance team doesn’t scale linearly with headcount. You can’t just keep hiring people to process spreadsheets. At some point, you need to work smarter.
When is the right time to move on from Excel?
There’s no magic number, but there are clear signs that Excel expense tracking is holding you back:
- You’re spending more time managing the spreadsheet than using the insights from it.
- Your team is complaining about how clunky the process is – and wasting hours filling out their claims.
- You’ve had compliance concerns or near-misses during audits.
- You can’t easily see who’s spending what, where or why.
- The thought of your finance person being off sick fills you with dread because no one else can navigate the system.
If any (or all) of these resonates, you’ve probably already outgrown Excel. And that’s fine. Most businesses start with spreadsheets, and then most eventually need something more robust.
Why will my team prefer Webexpenses to Excel?
Because it gets expenses off their plate in seconds. Let’s be real: Your sales team and field staff aren’t Excel fans. They find spreadsheets fiddly and frustrating, especially on mobile.
Webexpenses lets them snap a photo of a receipt and they’re done, no hunting for the right file or typing in details manually. No more saving up receipts for a month-end admin session.
Finance and accountants might love Excel, but your wider team will appreciate anything that makes expenses less of a chore. Less faff, faster reimbursement, happier people.
What you gain with a purpose-built system
This isn’t about replacing everything Excel does. It’s about having a tool designed specifically for expense management, rather than trying to bend a general-purpose spreadsheet into something it was never meant to be.
- Automated receipt capture: Your team takes a photo of their receipt. The system extracts the key data automatically, attaches the image to the claim and stores it all in one place. Your finance team checks and approves it. Done. No more lost receipts, no more manual typing and no more chasing people weeks later because they’ve binned the evidence.
- Real-time policy enforcement: Set your rules once, and our system will help enforce it. Claim above your limit? It is routed to a senior manager. Duplicate claim? Flagged immediately. Missing information? The claim won’t be submitted until it’s complete. You move from hoping people follow the rules to knowing they can’t break them, even accidentally.
- Proper approval workflows: Claims route automatically to the right approver based on amount, department or type. Approvers get notified, they can review on their phone or laptop, and they approve with one click. You can see exactly where every claim sits in the process.
- One source of truth: No more version control nightmares. Everyone works in the same system, looking at the same data, in real time. Finance can see claims as they’re submitted. Managers can check their team’s spending without asking for a spreadsheet. Your accountant can pull reports without waiting for you to send files.
- Reporting that doesn’t require a degree in Excel: Want to see spending by category? By person? By project? By month? You click a button and the report appears. The data’s already clean, already categorised and already accurate. You spend your time understanding what the numbers mean, not fixing pivot tables.
- Integration with your accounting system: Claims flow directly into Xero, NetSuite, Sage or whatever you use, with all the coding already applied. No double entry. No importing CSV files and hoping the columns line up. Just automatic, accurate data transfer that saves hours every month.
- Mileage tracking that actually works: If your team claims mileage, you know what a pain it is in Excel. They need to calculate distances, apply the right HMRC rates and remember to update when the rates change. With mileage tracking software, they enter start and end points, the system calculates the distance and applies the current approved rates automatically. Job done.
- Credit card reconciliation: Rather than manually matching credit card transactions to expense claims, you can reconcile company cards automatically. No more spreadsheet gymnastics at month end.
- A proper audit trail: Every approval is timestamped. When your auditors come calling, you’ve got everything they need in one place, with a clear trail from claim to payment. No more scrambling through emails or trying to remember who approved what.
What happens to our existing company credit cards if we switch from Excel?
You can keep using them. Webexpenses reconcile transactions from any corporate card provider, so you don’t need to switch. We also offer Expense Cards as a free feature if you want more control over spending limits and real-time visibility, but it’s completely optional. Many clients stick with their existing cards and simply use WebExpenses to manage and reconcile them more efficiently.
Why Webexpenses works for businesses outgrowing Excel
We’ve spent over 25 years helping UK businesses move beyond spreadsheets. We’re not going to pretend Excel is terrible, because it’s not. But we do know where it stops being the right tool, and we’ve built our platform around those exact pain points.
Webexpenses gives you receipt capture via our mobile app, so your team can snap and submit expenses in seconds. You get approval workflow automation that routes claims to the right people and escalates when needed. You get policy enforcement that actually works, flagging issues before they become problems. And you get reporting that takes minutes, not hours.
We include Expense Cards as a free feature if you want them (but you’re not locked into using them). We’ll reconcile your existing credit cards just as easily. You pay per active user, so your costs scale with your actual usage, not your headcount. And everything’s included at one price, no hidden tiers or surprise charges.
Your team gets a system they’ll actually use. Finance gets visibility and control. Your accountant gets clean data flowing directly into your accounting system. And you get your weekends back, because you’re not firefighting spreadsheet chaos.
Book a free demo with one of our sales team and we’ll show you exactly how much time and stress you could save by upgrading from Excel.
