Right, take a breath. Financial year-end is over with. And now is the right moment to audit your finance tech stack. Not because some article told you to, but because the evidence is still fresh. You know exactly where things broke down over the past FY: which processes were manual when they shouldn’t have been, how long close actually took, whether your expense management held up or added to the chaos.
This window closes fast. Once the new year picks up pace, the friction normalises again, and the changes won’t happen.
Speaking as a CFO, I’m going to make the case for using this brief aperture to look at expense management software – where it sits in your stack, what it’s costing you, and what a better version of it looks like.
This piece is for CFOs and Finance Directors making stack decisions. If you’re the one who signs off on software (or you need some help justifying the outlay on new tech), then this is for you.
What ‘the stack’ refers to
A finance tech stack is the collection of software tools a finance team uses to run its function: accounting, payroll, reporting, cash flow, spend management, and so on. It used to mean one or two big systems. Increasingly, though, it means a set of connected, specialist tools that each do one thing well.
Communities like CFO Techstack have been tracking how finance leaders actually build these stacks, and the pattern is consistent: the best-run finance functions aren’t waiting for an ERP to do everything. They’re making deliberate decisions about each slot in the stack and revisiting those decisions when they stop working.
Most finance teams are good at this for some parts of the stack. Expense management tends to be the slot that gets set up once and forgotten.
Why expense management is the most neglected slot
Expense management is the process of capturing, approving, reimbursing and reporting on employee spend. That covers everything from travel and subsistence claims to corporate card transactions, mileage, and petty cash.
The reason it gets neglected is that it mostly, kind of, sort of works. Expenses get submitted, eventually. Claims get approved, mostly. Employees get reimbursed at some point. And then, finally, month-end gets reconciled. Nobody raises a flag unless something goes visibly wrong.
The friction is diffuse, spread across an archipelago of small manual steps, late submissions, chasing approvals, and whatever your current corporate card setup actually gives you in return for the spend flowing through it.
Compounding admin debt
A good example of the kind of thing that slips through: HMRC mileage rates. Employees claiming mileage can claim 45p per mile for the first 10,000 miles in a financial year, dropping to 25p after that – and that threshold resets at year’s end.
If your platform isn’t automatically applying the latest HMRC figures and no one has manually checked, there’s a real chance your rates are wrong. Not catastrophically wrong. Just quietly wrong in a way that creates a correction job later.
We’ve just made automatic HMRC mileage rate updates a live feature in Webexpenses, because that’s precisely the kind of compounding admin debt a CFO shouldn’t have to think about.
This sort of friction only becomes visible during a period of pressure. Like, for instance, the financial year-end you just came through.
If close was harder than it needed to be, it’s worth asking how much of that was expense-related. Think Late claims that hit after the cutoff. The reconciliation took longer than it should have. Card statements that didn’t map cleanly to your chart of accounts.
These aren’t catastrophes: they’re slow costs, and they’re the kind of thing that’s easiest to fix right now, when they’re still fresh.
The moment after close is your best window
The case for acting now rather than in three months is straightforward. Right after financial year-end, you have something you don’t normally have: a full year of evidence about what your current setup actually costs you, sitting right in front of you.
You know how many hours the close took. Which processes your team found most painful. Whether your expense policy held up under pressure or fell apart. And if you’re carrying corporate cards, you know what sort of cashback you got from the spend that flowed through them (which, for most UK finance teams, is zilch).
This is what makes the post-FY period different from January. January is when people make decisions based on optimism. Right after close is when you make decisions based on evidence. The appetite for change is there, too. And the pressure is, briefly, off.
Making the case internally is also easier at this moment. If you want to propose a change to your expense management software or your card setup, you don’t need to argue from hypotheticals. You can point to what the last 12 months actually looked like and say: ‘this is the cost of not changing’.
That’s a much stronger argument than a vendor’s ROI projection (although if you’d like to get an ROI projection, we do actually offer that!).
The corporate card question most CFOs haven’t asked
Inside the expense management conversation, there’s a specific question worth raising: what is your corporate card (or expense card, or prepaid card, or supplier card, whatever you call it) actually doing for you?
The UK market for corporate cards attached to expense platforms breaks into a few distinct camps:
- Some providers offer no cashback at all: you’re paying for the software and getting nothing back from the spend.
- Others offer cashback that’s capped at your subscription fee: the benefit maxes out at breakeven.
- Others offer points rather than cash: which reduces the real financial value.
And then there’s us, the only UK provider (as far as we know) offering uncapped, unlimited cashback on expense cards.
We’ve written about how interchange economics actually work and why unlimited cashback is so rare. The short version: most platforms cap cashback because interchange revenue is where they make their margin.
If their business model depends on the card, they can’t afford to give all of it back.
For a finance team spending £500,000 a year through corporate cards, the difference is not trivial. At 0.75% unlimited cashback, that’s £3,750 back annually (on spend you were making regardless).
Making the internal case
If you want to use this moment to actually change something, the structure of the argument matters. Start with what the year just cost you, in concrete terms, not general ones:
- How many hours did your team spend on manual reconciliation?
- How much of close was eaten by expense-related admin?
- Did you maximise your VAT claim returns?
- Did late claims create problems with your audit trail or your reported figures?
- If you’re on a capped cashback card or no cashback at all, calculate the foregone return on your annual card spend. (At typical UK SME volumes, it’ll be substantial).
If you’re processing expenses manually, the opportunity cost is calculable. Of course, the objections you’ll get are predictable. ‘We’re used to how it works.’ ‘The migration sounds painful.’ ‘We don’t have bandwidth right now.’
The honest answer is that switching always has a cost – but so does staying. The question is which cost is higher over the next 12 months. Right after close, you have a year’s worth of data to answer that confidently.
What Webexpenses does differently
Our expense management software handles the full process: mobile receipt capture, automated policy enforcement, mileage tracking, real-time visibility across all spend, and a full audit trail that doesn’t require manual reconstruction at month’s end.
Everything connects directly to your accounting system through native integrations. So the data flows without a manual step in the middle.
The part most finance leaders don’t expect, though, is the card. When an employee pays with a Webexpenses Card, the transaction is captured, categorised, and matched automatically. And the cashback – up to 0.75% unlimited, depending on your pricing tier – comes back to you on spend you were making anyway.
On £500k of annual card spend with 100 users, that’s £3,750 cashback. After our subscription fee, your net profit is £2,250 — money back on spend you were making anyway. So in the end, the question isn’t whether it’s worth it. It’s how long you’ve been leaving money on the table.
If you want to see how the numbers stack up for your specific situation, book a demo.
