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The hidden cost that is draining your finance team’s working week

Piero Macari says reducing manual finance processes can free teams to focus on more strategic, value-adding work.

Opinion
5 min read
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Finance teams are under more pressure than ever to operate as strategic partners to the business. Yet in conversations with finance leaders over the past year, one theme has surfaced repeatedly: the gap between what finance professionals are capable of contributing and what the working week actually allows them to do.

Our research, conducted among 300 UK CFOs from organisations with an annual turnover above £20m has put a number on something most people in finance already feel. 86% of finance teams spend six or more hours per person, per week on administration across expenses, invoices and supplier payments. Nearly 30% are spending more than 11 hours.

For many teams, that amounts to more than a full working day, every week, spent on tasks that exist not because they add value but because the systems around them were not designed to eliminate them. I call this the Manual Tax. It does not appear on any budget line or headcount plan. But it is being paid every week, and unlike most taxes, it compounds.

Why it matters now The timing of this conversation could not be more relevant. Deloitte’s April 2026 UK CFO Survey confirms that cost discipline, liquidity and operational efficiency are firmly back at the top of the finance agenda, shaped by a more volatile backdrop of geopolitical risk and economic uncertainty. Most cost scrutiny lands on visible items: headcount, vendor contracts, capital expenditure. The Manual Tax is not visible. It does not show up on a dashboard or trigger an alert, and that is precisely what makes it so consistently overlooked.

Our research shows that 83% of finance leaders say their spend processes are still more manual than they should be, while 85% believe current payment processes increase the risk of error, fraud or off-policy spend. These are not fringe concerns. They describe the operational reality for the majority of UK finance functions right now, across sectors and organisation sizes.

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Where the work comes from

The source of the problem is structural and it is worth being specific about where it sits. In most organisations, payment processes remain disconnected from data capture and control systems. Spend is authorised in one place, recorded in another and reconciled somewhere else entirely.

Each handoff in that chain creates friction: approvals to chase, data to re-enter, exceptions to investigate, discrepancies to resolve. Finance professionals with strong analytical skills and hard-won commercial knowledge spend significant portions of their week on tasks that exist not because they add value, but because the systems around them were not designed to eliminate them.

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Over time, this workload does not stay contained but expands to fill the available capacity and becomes embedded in how finance teams operate. It feels normal because it has always been this way. But normal is not the same as inevitable and the organisations that recognise that distinction are the ones I see pulling ahead.

The strategic cost of lost time

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When asked how they would redeploy their time if administrative workload were reduced by 25 to 50%, the CFOs in our research gave a consistent answer. They did not say they would reduce headcount or cut costs but did say they would focus on forecasting, analysis and strategic planning. This is business partnering, forward-looking and insight-driven work that finance functions are increasingly being asked to lead but too rarely have the capacity to deliver consistently.

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That gap between expectation and execution is where the Manual Tax does its most damage. It is a strategic constraint, quietly limiting what finance functions can contribute at precisely the moment when organisations need that contribution most. However, the capability is there, the training is there but too often what is missing is simply the time.

What a better working week looks like

The answer does not require a large-scale transformation programme. The more immediate question is where the administrative burden is actually being created. For many organisations, that points to how payments are executed and recorded day to day. When spend is captured and structured at the point of payment rather than reconstructed downstream through manual effort, the reconciliation burden reduces significantly. Control moves closer to the transaction, visibility improves rather than arriving retrospectively and finance teams recover meaningful time without needing to overhaul their entire technology stack.

81% of the finance leaders in our research already see card-led payments as a competitive advantage, citing improvements in control, visibility and efficiency. This is significant.

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The conversation about how finance professionals spend their time too often starts with headcount or cost reduction but it should start somewhere else: with an honest assessment of where skilled people are being absorbed by avoidable process and what it would take to redirect that capacity. Reducing the Manual Tax is about giving finance teams the time to do more of what they were hired to do.

Piero Macari is VP product corporate payments at Corpay

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