For a decade, the advice to finance teams was simple: build a tech stack. One tool for expenses, one for accounts payable, one for accounts receivable, one for cashflow, each one connected to the others by an integration.
That approach solved individual problems and created a new one: nobody had the whole picture.
That was the backdrop when we brought the research behind it to the stage at Reaching New Heights in Finance, our September event in London (CPD accredited, like all our events now by the way).
Webexpenses’ leadership – Duncan Wilson, Tatiana Molina, Chris Fleck and Simon Connell – walked a room of finance leaders through what 300 of their peers had told us, and the numbers set the tone for everything that followed.
- 82% want to see accounts receivable, accounts payable and cashflow in one place.
- 73% want a single feed of all finance activity.
- At the same time, only 25% feel it’s easy for employees to submit expenses.
- Only 24% feel it’s easy for finance teams to manage them.
- Only 20% feel confident they can enforce policy.
Put those together and the direction is clear. You don’t want more tools. You want fewer, better connected ones. Call it the great de-stackification: the finance tech stack got too big to manage, and the people running it are the ones asking for it to shrink.
Where the fragmentation actually costs you
Some of this is obvious once you say it out loud. 30% of finance leaders agree their team “lives in spreadsheets, not systems”.
Only 28% disagreed that their team spends real time reconciling data between systems, which means most finance teams are doing that reconciliation work quietly, week after week, as the cost of running several disconnected tools.
None of this is a failure of any single system. Each tool in a typical stack does its own job well. The cost sits in the gaps between them: the same figure re-keyed twice, a manager chasing a number that already exists somewhere else, a Friday afternoon spent matching one spreadsheet against another before anyone can trust the total.
Why one platform is possible now
Wanting one platform is not new. What has changed is what makes it workable, and that was the subject of the event’s guest talk from Kevon Kelly, AI Sherpa at Tenzing.
For years, automation in finance meant robotic process automation, RPA: software that followed an exact script. It read an invoice, matched fields, posted the entry. It worked well right up until something changed.
A new field, an unfamiliar format, a supplier who renamed a column, and the whole thing stopped and waited for a person to notice.
AI agents in finance work differently, Kelly explained. Instead of following a fixed script, you give an agent a goal and the tools to reach it, and it works out the route. It can read a document it has never seen before and decide what to do with a mismatch instead of just stopping.
The stat worth paying attention to here is not the one everyone quotes first. The automatic match rate barely moves, from 88% to 92%. The real shift is in how fast you recover when something doesn’t match: from 2.5 days down to 6 hours, because the agent records what it saw and why it acted. So a person can fix the actual problem instead of hunting for it.
That gap between automatic and automated matters. Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027, and the reason is not that the technology fails.
It’s unclear value and weak controls. Kelly’s advice to the room was practical rather than cautious:
- Find out who on your team is already using AI informally.
- Check what your existing finance tools already offer before you buy something new.
- Turn one workflow into an owned process rather than a hobby.
Connection beats addition
Fragmentation doesn’t only cost time. It creates these little nooks where things can go unnoticed. That point came from an unexpected direction at the event: fraud expert Becky Holmes, speaking about romance and investment scams, described isolation, gaslighting and shame as the tactics that let fraud go unnoticed for months.
Now, your software isn’t gaslighting of course. But the same pattern shows up in finance systems that don’t talk to each other. Gaps nobody is watching, numbers nobody cross-checks.
Cezanne’s CEO, Simon Noble, made a related point from the same stage. Connected systems change what you’re able to ask. Instead of asking where you can add another point tool, you start asking where the friction actually is, and you fix that instead.
How Webexpenses is building towards this
This is where the product comes in, and it’s worth being specific rather than vague about it.
- Live today: VAT analytics that flag reclaimable spend without you digging for it, receipt capture that reads what’s in front of it, cashback on eligible transactions, and HMRC mileage rates applied automatically so you’re not recalculating them by hand.
- Coming next: a new mobile app, EUR cards, more HRIS connections, and stronger integrations across the board.
None of those features matter much on their own. What matters is that they sit in one system, behind one login, feeding one view of your spend. That is the specific thing 73% of the finance leaders we surveyed said they wanted: a single feed of finance activity instead of five separate ones.
And it’s why 73% said they’d implement an AI-embedded, one-platform solution within the next 12 to 18 months, if it were reasonably priced. And it’s the direction Webexpenses is building in: a world free of financial admin, one connected system at a time.
See how Webexpenses brings expenses, cards and spend into one platform. Book a demo now.
