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Expenses - are you modern or trad?

Journalist: Rebecca Burn-Callander, Freelance

ended 13. July 2026

Looking for small business owners to comment on two articles that will be published on Techfinitive.

Please only choose one or the other, can’t use same companies for both. The more colour the better - what’s gone wrong? How much have you saved? Have you uncovered any dodgy expenses?! We will give you a link back if featured. TIA

1.) were you recently managing expenses manually with spreadsheets and email approvals? Are you going to migrate to a digital system or already have? I’m looking for business owners to comment on the traditional expenses process - and the benefits and drawbacks of moving to a modern system - have you unleashed efficiency?

2.) do you use technology to see spending/expenses in real time? Why has this been a game changer for your business? I need small business owners to tell me all about how modern card systems give them real-time spend visibility, how it helps finance teams control budgets, spot issues earlier and avoid month-end surprises and all that good stuff!

1 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Harvey Dhillon
Founder & CEO at Zmartly
The problem with a spreadsheet was never the spreadsheet. It is the gap between spending the money and recording it. A receipt sits in an email thread for three weeks, the VAT on it is never reclaimed, and by month end nobody can remember what it was for, so the sign-off becomes a rubber stamp. Proper expenses software closes that gap: the receipt is captured at the point of spend, coded there and then, and whoever approves it can actually see what they are approving. The expense you cannot see is the one you never reclaim. The bigger shift is compliance. Digital record-keeping is already the rule for VAT under Making Tax Digital and is now extending to income tax, so a shoebox of receipts and a manual spreadsheet is quietly becoming a liability, not a saving. If you still run expenses by email, move the receipt capture to the point of spend first. The coding, the VAT and the sign-off all get easier once the paperwork stops going missing.