how to keep company spending under control as you grow

As companies grow, keeping track of company spending becomes harder, with more people, payments, subscriptions and currencies entering the picture. How to keep spending controlled and manageable?

This article is written by Wallester, a European fintech providing business accounts and payment cards across the EEA and the UK. With a Client Success team working directly with growing businesses every day, Wallester has a close view of the spending challenges that emerge as companies add people, tools and markets.

When you run a business alone, spending is easy. One person buys things, and one card pays for them. You know every payment because you made it. You don't have spreadsheets to follow, because you can just remember where the money went.

As the company grows, a freelancer joins, then another. People start paying for software, travel, tools, and ads. Now money leaves the business from many places at once, often in different countries and currencies. 

Once you grow, knowing how much you spend is not enough. You also need to know where the money goes, and who is spending it. Here are some ways to keep spend management under control as your company grows.

Why keeping track of company spending gets harder as you grow

Habits that help you run a company build up slowly, so the problems are easy to miss at first. One habit founders and employees should have is spend management. It means tracking what a company buys and keeping spending under control. 

As companies grow, many founders keep the spend management setup that worked when the company was small. They pay with personal cards, track costs in spreadsheets, collect receipts by hand, and pay people back whenever they get around to it.

At first, these processes don’t feel like a problem. But as the company grows, they start to cost you. Employees forget to mark down when they spent money, receipts go missing, and expenses become harder to track. When nobody is clearly in charge, mistakes are spotted late or not at all.

What goes wrong when your old system stops working

When most founders think about money, they think about spending less. But growing companies usually hit a different problem before cutting costs. They will lose visibility into who spent money, on what and whether that purchase was allowed.

Problems start when no one can say who spent an amount, or why, or whether anyone approved it first. In a small company, the founder is that approver. In a bigger one, without a clear rule, purchases just happen with no one confirming them.

When information about money spent is missing, the finance team’s work gets harder. Instead of staying on top of spending as it happens, the person handling the books has to chase receipts, ask people to explain payments, and dig through bank statements to figure out what was decided weeks ago, even if the payments were perfectly fine.

Manual work also adds up quickly.

Imagine paying someone back for a work purchase. Once a month, taking five minutes to check the receipt and send the money is easy. But when ten people send in expenses every week, those five minutes turn into hours. Mistakes creep in, and people wait for days to get their money back. 

The same problems show up in other tasks that pile up: collecting receipts, sorting each purchase into the right group for the accounts, getting purchases approved, and keeping an eye on every subscription so none renews unnoticed. Each is easy once, but painful to repeat.

Losing track of spend is worst for businesses that rely on software, online ads, contractors, and travel, because that spending is frequent and spread out. As spending grows, understanding it clearly matters as much as keeping it low.

How to structure spend management as a growing company

Nobody wants to build an inefficient system. A bad system results from sticking with what worked earlier. As the company grows, manual work doesn't scale as well as software would.

The best time to set up a spend management structure is before forgotten subscriptions and end-of-month scrambles. You don't need a finance department for basic spending controls – a few steps do most of the work:

• Keep business and personal spending separate, so company costs never get mixed up with someone's own money.
• Give every company expense a clear owner, so each cost is tied to a named person or team.
• Set simple rules for who can approve what, so bigger purchases get a quick check before the money goes out.
• Make sure you can see every payment in real time, not at the end of the month.

Simple habits and settings can be put in place from the start, and there are tools that allow you to do exactly that.

Ask for help from service providers

The way you handle money has to grow with the business. What works for a founder and one contractor will not work for a team of ten or twenty.

This is where tools like Wallester Business help. It’s a card-issuing platform, meaning a product that lets a company create its own payment cards, real or virtual, for its staff. 

You can:

• Give each employee or contractor their own card
• Set a spending limit on each one
• See every payment the moment it happens
• Pay in different currencies
• Track expenses all in one place

That’s how a growing company stays in control of its money without making daily work any harder. Growth always adds moving parts. The fix is making sure your view of the money keeps up with them.

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