CFO guide: taking control of company spending

Before getting into tools, a quick reality check. The GBTA Foundation, in its benchmark study on expense reporting practices, puts the average cost of processing a single expense report at $58, a figure that covers everything from data entry and approval through to accounting integration^[1]. The same study flags an error rate of 19%, nearly one in five reports, and a correction cost of roughly $52 per erroneous report^[2]. For an SMB processing 300 reports a month, the savings potential far exceeds the cost of a spend management platform.

Beyond the unit cost, it is the fragmentation that drains finance teams: a corporate card payment here, paper expense reports there, supplier invoices arriving by email, and an expense tool that cannot talk to the accounting software. Each silo looks reasonable on its own; stacked together, they create risk: duplicate payments, low-level fraud, unrecovered VAT, closing cycles that keep slipping. Spend management starts with consolidating the flows, not buying yet another piece of software. Our expense management white paper maps out the target-state chain in detail.

A corporate card is more than a payment method. It is the point at which spend policy actually executes. As long as that policy lives in a PDF signed once a year, it only ever justifies a rejection after the fact. Encode it in the payment instrument and it becomes an upstream control: the only moment when blocking a non-compliant purchase costs nothing. Monthly limit per card, per-transaction cap, permitted categories (fuel, tolls, meals, accommodation), and blocked MCC codes: configure it once and it applies to every payment, everywhere.

Complementary controls such as geographic restrictions, temporary card freezes and split-transaction alerts turn the card into a management tool, not just a disbursement mechanism. On the mobility side, the Greenway multi-brand fuel card illustrates the same principle: a single card handles fuel, EV charging, and tolls, with a per-driver limit and an accounting export broken down by vehicle. Finance gets a clean data feed, categorised by type and cost centre, without waiting for month end.

A spend item is only truly managed once it becomes a journal entry, without manual re-keying. That has historically been the weak link: an excellent expense tool that exports a CSV requiring manual processing simply shifts the problem downstream. In France, three vendors dominate accounting for mid-market companies and SMBs: Sage, Cegid, and Pennylane, each with a different integration approach^[3]. Pennylane natively bundles expense management and procurement via its own OCR engine; Sage and Cegid typically rely on a third-party document capture module (usually Dext) to digitise receipts, then push journal entries to the general ledger^[4].

What matters to a CFO is not the OCR but the quality of the accounting bridge: analytical coding preserved, FEC-compatible export, Factur-X support for supplier invoices, and ideally a native connector rather than a manual export/import cycle. That is exactly the level of integration the Greenway platform targets: card transactions and their supporting documents feed directly into the company's accounting software, with no intermediate spreadsheet. For the upstream side, our e-invoicing and procurement white paper covers the full chain, from receiving purchase invoices through validation to accounting integration.

France's e-invoicing reform is reshaping how finance teams operate. Since mid-2024, the tax authority has published clarified thresholds and timelines^[5][6]. From 1 September 2026, every VAT-registered business must be able to receive electronic invoices via an accredited platform or the public invoicing portal (PPF). Issuance is being phased in: large companies (exceeding two of three thresholds: €50m revenue, €25m balance sheet, 250 employees) from 1 September 2026, then SMBs and micro-businesses from 1 September 2027^[6].

In practice, the PDF-by-email workflow disappears in favour of structured formats such as Factur-X, UBL or CII, transmitted via an accredited platform or the PPF. For a CFO, the challenge is twofold: technical (connecting the accounting software to a compliant platform) and operational (tightening the invoice/purchase order/payment matching process). Sage, Cegid, and Pennylane all communicate on their PDP compliance and connectors; the trade-off comes down to workflow simplicity and export quality^[7]. Tax treatment of business expenses is covered separately in our business tax white paper.

Sustainability reporting is catching up with financial reporting. The CSRD directive, together with the accompanying ESRS standards, requires verifiable and auditable ESG reporting grounded in double materiality^[8]. A significant share of Scope 3 emissions, the upstream indirect emissions, is calculated from spend data broken down by purchasing category, using what is known as the spend-based approach. For finance leadership, this changes the equation: purchase journal entries now feed both the income statement and the company's carbon footprint^[9].

The operational consequence is clear: a spend item miscategorised at source corrupts both the financial analytics and the carbon calculation. That is why it matters to have a tool that assigns the category at the point of transaction, rather than guessing it at month end. It also makes the Greenway 1%ForAll® commitment legible: 1% of every transaction is donated to the Greenway Foundation, and that contribution is itself a traceable spend data point in the reporting. The commitment becomes measurable, not a tagline.

Good spend management is measurable. Rather than an overloaded dashboard, four metrics are enough to tell you whether the chain is working: the rate of unsupported expenses at close, the average time from payment to journal entry, the actual VAT recovery rate on business expenses, and the share of automatically categorised spend (for Scope 3 data quality). When all four improve, finance leadership saves time at close, recovers cash through VAT, and gains credibility in audits.