Here’s What Keeps Finance Managers Up at Night

What are the biggest expense management challenges finance teams are facing right now?

To find out, Navan conducted a survey of 375 finance professionals in August 2023, and people in all types of finance roles — CFOs, controllers, and others — responded. The results were so illuminating that we created an e-book to tell the story: Biggest Expense Management Challenges — and How to Overcome Them.

The Surprising — and Not-So-Surprising — Survey Results

Navan knows just how difficult managing T&E spend can be; we’ve heard it from many companies. Helping them do it effectively and efficiently is one reason we created an integrated T&E solution.

Our survey provides more evidence that T&E is indeed the hardest category of spend to manage. It also sheds light on just how much harder this category is: More than 38% of all respondents cited it as the most difficult. The survey’s second- and third-place finishers — website/software subscriptions and payroll/benefits — came in a distant second and third (14.9% and 14.6%, respectively).

What makes T&E spend so difficult? For many finance teams, it comes down to control and visibility. They need to enforce T&E compliance policies, so costs don’t spiral. They need to control processes, so employees don’t spend unnecessary time on routine tasks. And they need to have real-time visibility into spend, so they can make changes immediately — not at month’s end.

Here’s the breakdown of responses when asked about the biggest challenges to reducing costs (they could select multiple answers):

• 36%: Employees spend too much time on business processes — such as booking travel, submitting expenses, and reconciliation — losing crucial productivity as a result.
• 35.5%: Our company lacks real-time visibility into company spend.
• 21.9%: Our company lacks the ability to enforce compliance over travel and expense policies, often resulting in overspending.
• 13.9%: Other answers, which included manual processes and turning in receipts.

Survey respondents also told us what upcoming initiatives they were planning and, if they could double their technology budgets, how they would allocate the funds.

We also asked respondents which processes are automated at their companies — you may be surprised at how many answered “none.”

See all of the survey results and learn how Navan is uniquely positioned to help companies leap over obstacles and achieve their financial goals.

Download the Navan e-book: Biggest Expense Management Challenges — and How to Overcome Them.