The end of manual expense management: how AI is transforming spend control

The manual grind nobody wants

If you ask a finance leader at a growing company what keeps them up at night, the answer isn’t strategy, it’s the soul-crushing manual work of expenses and reimbursements. Late-night reconciliations. Endless spreadsheets. Constant email reminders chasing receipts.

Employees feel it too: covering company costs out of pocket, waiting weeks for reimbursement, and navigating nonstop back-and-forth with finance.

Finance teams report spending up to 30% of their month-end close just chasing receipts and reconciling fragmented data. That’s valuable time lost on administrative tasks instead of analysis. The result? Slow closes, frustrated employees, and finance teams stuck in the role of “spend police” rather than strategic partners.

But there’s a better way.

Why rules-only “automation” falls short

Legacy automation tools promised relief but rarely delivered. Rules-only systems:

• Break when a vendor changes invoice formats.

• Don’t learn or improve over time.

• Still force finance teams to police exceptions manually.

And even when they work, rules-only systems take a lot of time and effort to set up, maintain, and troubleshoot, time that could be spent on higher-value work like analysis, planning, or strategic initiatives. Instead of removing the grunt work, they’ve just shifted it around, leaving fragmented workflows and frustrated teams.

AI-native Spend: built to eliminate the busywork

Airwallex Spend is built with AI at its core, running silently in the background of every workflow to eliminate repetitive, error-prone tasks.

Spend AI tackles the headaches of manual processes: it automatically matches receipts and bills, auto-approves in-policy expenses, and ensures finance teams have a clean, accurate ledger at all times.

Across teams, Spend AI removes busywork and speeds up approvals:

• Employees: just submit receipts. Get reimbursed faster, skip the accounting details, and never front company costs.

• Managers: only step in to review out-of-policy spend; expedite the rest with confidence.

• Finance teams: routine verifications happen behind the scenes, freeing up time for forecasting, planning, and more strategic work.

Imagine a finance stack where employees simply submit, managers focus only on exceptions, and finance always has an accurate, up-to-date ledger. That’s the everyday reality of Airwallex Spend.

Real-world scenarios: faster approvals, smarter finance

With AI embedded across every workflow, Airwallex Spend doesn’t wait for month-end reviews; it intercepts issues in real time, protecting compliance, cash flow, and the bottom line.

Month-end close at a growing SaaS company → Finance teams used to spend three days manually reconciling invoices line by line. Now, with receipts matched and accounting values pre-filled, the same review takes just a single session.

Expense reporting in a distributed consulting firm → Employees no longer need to file expense reports at all. Receipts are forwarded by email or mobile, auto-coded, and reimbursed promptly, saving hours every month while shortening reimbursement cycles.

Scaling AP at an e-commerce brand → As transaction volumes double, AP teams don’t need to add headcount. The AP agent flexes to handle the load, keeping pace with business growth without creating bottlenecks.

Instead of spending days chasing, matching, and correcting, finance teams simply review and approve. Employees get reimbursed quickly, and the process flows seamlessly, without manual bottlenecks slowing down the business.

The real ROI of AI in spend management

ROI from AI isn’t theoretical, it shows up in reclaimed time.

One of our early access partners processes around 8,000 reimbursement claims per year. Before AI, each claim required roughly two minutes of manual review, even when the expense was clearly compliant. That added up to 33 working days a year, more than a full calendar month, spent doing nothing but clicking “approve.”

After deploying the Airwallex AI Policy Agent, the data told a clear story: 64% of expenses were low-risk and fully compliant.

The result? Those routine coffee receipts, office supplies, and recurring charges no longer needed human eyes. By enabling auto-approvals, the team eliminated 21 days of manual “rubber-stamping” and redirected that time toward higher-value work like policy design, forecasting, and strategic planning.

They didn’t just buy software. They bought back three weeks of their year.

That’s the real ROI of AI in spend management: not just faster processing, but meaningful time returned to finance teams so they can focus on what actually moves the business forward.

Scaling without scaling busywork

Whether you’re a founder closing the books yourself or a mid-market CFO managing a distributed team, Airwallex Spend scales with you. Instead of hiring extra headcount just to manage receipts and invoices, workflows flex to handle complexity without creating manual overhead.

Finance teams gain a faster close, employees experience quicker reimbursements, and the finance function grows strategically alongside the business. By automating routine tasks, teams can focus on analysis, planning, and high-value initiatives that truly drive the company forward.