🏠︎ | Past Sessions | Gaining Control and Agility Transforming Finance with Decentralised Spend Management
- Event: Finance Forum 25
- Date: 7 October 2025
- Speaker: Rory Choudhuri, Head of Product Marketing, Soldo
- Estimated read time: 6-7 minutes
Quick summary
This session explored how finance teams can regain control of decentralised spend without slowing the business down.
The core tension discussed was familiar to most finance leaders, how to maintain control and compliance while giving teams the freedom to act quickly. Rory Choudhuri described a growing gap between trust and access, where employees are trusted to spend but lack timely access to funds, leading to missed opportunities.
The session argued that decentralised spend is not an exception but a structural reality. The practical answer is not tighter after the fact controls, but proactive, rules based systems that give finance real time visibility while enabling the business to move.
Why decentralised spend has become a finance problem
Finance transformation remains the top stated priority for CFOs, but the scope of finance accountability has expanded. Beyond reporting and forecasting, finance is now expected to support growth, lead change, and enable faster decision making across the organisation.
Against that backdrop, decentralised spend has become more visible and more problematic. It sits outside traditional procurement and accounts payable processes, yet it touches almost every part of the organisation, from travel and expenses to unplanned operational purchases and departmental subscriptions.
Rory described this as a trust paradox. Most finance leaders say they trust employees to spend company money, and most employees feel trusted. Yet many organisations still miss growth opportunities because those employees cannot access funds quickly enough when decisions need to be made.
Centralised versus decentralised spend, two very different challenges
The session drew a clear distinction between two categories of spend.
Centralised spend typically represents the majority of organisational spend by value. It is concentrated across a small number of suppliers, governed by contracts, and supported by mature procurement and payment processes. For most finance teams, this area is well controlled and predictable.
Decentralised spend is different. By value it is smaller, but it is spread across a large number of suppliers and situations. It includes travel and expenses, unplanned operational needs, and department level purchases that often happen without prior finance involvement. This is where friction, delays, and blind spots tend to appear.
Crucially, decentralised spend is often unplanned. Budgets may exist, but the timing, location, and nature of individual transactions are not always known in advance, making traditional approval flows impractical.
The cost of reactive spend management
Most organisations still manage decentralised spend reactively. Employees spend first, then reconcile later. This creates a familiar set of problems, petty cash floating around the business, shared cards with unclear ownership, delayed receipt submission, and manual reconciliation work for finance teams.
Rory highlighted that this approach introduces hidden costs. Finance loses visibility until after the event, policy enforcement is inconsistent, and teams on the ground are slowed down by process rather than enabled by it. The result is neither strong control nor real agility.
In practice, finance is forced into a false trade off, choosing between control and speed, when the business increasingly needs both.
Replacing reconciliation with real time control
The alternative model presented in the session was proactive and rules led.
Instead of relying on post spend reconciliation, finance sets clear spending rules upfront. These can include time windows, currencies, merchant categories, and policy restrictions, tailored by role, team, or geography. Once defined, these rules are enforced automatically at the point of spend.
This shifts finance from policing after the fact to governing in advance. Employees are empowered to act quickly within agreed boundaries, while finance retains oversight and compliance.
A critical change is visibility. Transactions are visible in real time, with spend categorised automatically and checked against budgets and policy as it happens, not weeks later.
Real time data changes the finance conversation
Rory emphasised that decentralised spend becomes far more manageable when data is available immediately.
When transactions are captured in real time, finance can see what is being spent, where, and why. Receipts are logged at the point of purchase, categorisation is automated, and data can be passed directly into ERP, accounting, and HR systems through integrations.
This reduces manual effort and removes common failure points such as missing receipts or delayed VAT reclaim. It also allows finance to spot patterns early, rather than discovering issues during month end close.
“The traditional challenge of finance being forced to choose between levels of control and levels of agility goes away.” Rory Choudhuri, Head of Product Marketing, Soldo
What decentralised spend management looks like in practice
The session included examples of how organisations have applied this approach across different spend types.
For planned departmental spend, budgets can be split into separate wallets linked to projects or properties, allowing teams to spend against clearly defined limits while finance tracks usage centrally.
For unplanned operational spend, finance can provision funds instantly when needs arise on site, avoiding delays that would otherwise disrupt work.
Across these scenarios, the consistent benefit is reduced manual reconciliation, improved visibility, and fewer blind spots in spend data.
What good looks like for finance leaders
Decentralised spend is already happening in most organisations. The choice is whether it remains informal and reactive, or structured and visible.
For finance leaders, the session framed good practice as creating systems that assume decentralisation, rather than fighting it. Control comes from clear rules, real time data, and integration with core finance systems, not from slowing decisions down.
Agility comes from trusting teams with access, within boundaries, and removing the administrative friction that prevents them from acting when opportunities arise.
Practical actions finance leaders can take now
Questions to ask your team
- Where does decentralised spend currently sit outside our visibility
- How much time is spent reconciling after the event rather than managing upfront
- Which spend categories regularly cause delays or exceptions
- Do employees have clarity on what they are allowed to spend and when
- Increasing reliance on petty cash or shared cards
- Late or missing receipts impacting close and VAT recovery
- Finance discovering spend issues weeks after decisions were made
- Operational teams delaying activity due to approval bottlenecks
- Treating decentralised spend as a compliance nuisance rather than a structural reality
- Adding layers of approval instead of clearer rules
- Assuming technology alone will fix behaviour without clear policy design
- Measuring control only at month end rather than in real time
What good looks like
A well run decentralised spend model gives finance confidence without slowing the business. Employees know their boundaries, spend is visible instantly, reconciliation is largely automated, and finance time shifts from chasing paperwork to supporting better decisions.
Conclusion, control and agility are no longer opposites
The central message of the session was that finance does not need to trade control for agility. With the right approach to decentralised spend management, both are achievable.
As finance transformation continues, the ability to govern spend in real time, rather than after the fact, becomes a foundation for growth, not just an operational improvement. For finance leaders, this is less about new tools and more about adopting an operating model that reflects how organisations actually spend today.
Speaker
Head of Product Marketing, Soldo, shaping how the platform is brought to market and translating complex spend management challenges into practical insight for finance leaders.