4 strategies for enterprise finance teams to drive down spend

As businesses grow from midsize companies to large enterprises, controlling spend becomes much harder as the number of employees, transactions, and purchasing channels all increase. Legacy spend tools that were built for smaller teams or were the best solution available for a large company a decade ago can quietly bleed millions from the bottom line. What may seem like minor inconveniences turns into death by a thousand cuts: time-consuming workflows, delayed reimbursements, and approvals stuck in inbox limbo.

Leading enterprise finance teams are modernizing expense workflows with automation and smarter, tighter controls that free up time, reduce risk, and, above all, drive real savings. Below are four proven strategies to help large companies decrease spend.

1. Set granular card controls to prevent non-compliant spend

Large companies with thousands of employees could lose seven figures every year to corporate cards with no restrictions or reimbursement-based workflows. That’s why modern finance teams are embracing modern cards that offer granular, dynamic controls.

Cards that let admins set spend rules based on category, vendor, amount, or date give business the power to automatically preempt out-of-policy transactions. This prevents time-consuming headaches for managers and finance admins later by reducing non-compliant spend.

2. Eliminate expense reports to save thousands of hours

Employees dread expense reports. In legacy systems, it takes about 13 minutes to submit a single report, based on Ramp estimates.¹ At scale, that adds up to more than 14,000 hours and $500,000 per year in wasted time for a large company.

Modern tools flip the model entirely. Instead of making employees manually cobble together receipts and expense details, expenses largely submit themselves. These platforms automatically match transactions to preapproved funds, collect receipts via integrations, and use AI to suggest accounting codes and memos.

3. Automate approvals for low-risk transactions

Not every transaction needs scrutiny from finance or department heads. In fact, forcing managers to sign off on every $30 charge is a recipe for delays and inefficiency.

Finance leaders are now implementing AI agents that can automatically review every expense and recommend whether to approve, reject, or review each transaction. These agents can even clear low-risk expenses so only a small percentage of transactions get escalated. This saves finance valuable time and translates to a much better experience for employees who make frequent purchases.

4. Detect and reduce fraud with AI-powered tools

Legacy systems have few features in place to catch fraud, and the cost of this fraud only increases as the business scales. Businesses lose 5% of their annual revenue to fraud and the cost of losses is only increasing, according to an AFCE study.

But an intelligent system can instantly flag duplicate, blurry, AI-generated, or other atypical receipts. It can also pick up other unexpected activities such as an expense incurred over the weekend. These checks reduce risk by helping enterprises stay compliant and audit-ready without adding workload.

See the true cost of legacy tools

Outdated expense tools don’t just create friction—they drain resources at every level. By modernizing spend management, enterprise finance teams can reclaim tens of thousands of hours and millions of dollars annually.

Want to dig into the data behind these numbers? Download the full white paper to see how top enterprises are transforming their approach to spend.

_{¹ Concur estimates it reduces report handling and processing time by 36%, which translates to seven minutes faster, based on the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) estimate that it takes 20 minutes to manually create a report.}

^{1. Concur estimates it reduces report handling and processing time by 36%, which translates to seven minutes faster, based on the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) estimate that it takes 20 minutes to manually create a report.}