From spreadsheets to smart finance: How Airwallex automates expense management

Key takeaways:

By the end of this post, you’ll see how Airwallex helps finance teams to:

• Automate month-end close: Save hours every week by eliminating manual receipt collection and reconciliation.

• Enforce policy in real time: Prevent overspending and ensure compliance with built-in card limits, merchant restrictions, and approval workflows.

• Gain complete spend visibility: Monitor corporate cards, employee expenses, bills, and purchase orders all in one dashboard.

• Streamline procurement and payments: Track committed spend and billing progress seamlessly without manual effort.

• Focus finance on strategy:  Free your team from administrative tasks so they can model, forecast, and guide business decisions.

In our last post, we shared five signs you’ve outgrown manual expense management, from painful month-end closes to buried policies and missing receipts. For scaling companies, these challenges aren’t just frustrating; they hold finance teams back from playing the strategic role the business needs.

But luckily, there’s a better way forward. Instead of patching processes together, growing teams can replace manual work with automation, real-time visibility, and connected workflows, freeing finance to guide the business, not chase receipts.

1. Close month-end faster and with less stress

Let’s start with one of the biggest headaches for finance teams: month-end close, when teams often feel the crunch of late nights spent chasing receipts and approvals.

With Airwallex, what used to be a stressful end-of-month scramble becomes a streamlined, automated process. Employees can submit receipts on the go through the mobile app or forward them by email. OCR technology extracts key details and automatically matches each receipt to the correct transaction, reducing errors and manual touch points. Custom approval flows route expenses to the right manager, while integrations with Xero, QuickBooks, and NetSuite keep accounts accurate without extra reconciliation work.

Dovetail, a full-service digital agency, used to rely on a shared corporate card and manual reconciliation. Their finance team spent hours chasing down receipts and trying to assign spend to the right person.

After switching to Airwallex, each team member now uses their own dedicated virtual card with built-in controls. Spend is tracked in real time, and reconciliation is automatic. The finance team now saves up to three hours a week on receipt collection alone and closes the books faster with fewer errors. But solving month-end is only part of the puzzle. Expense policies also need to be clear, consistent, and automatically enforced if you want to scale without friction.

Read the full case study to see how Dovetail scaled their finance operations.

2. Enforce expense policy automatically

Airwallex takes policies out of static documents and embeds them directly into the payment process. You can set card limits, restrict merchant categories, and configure approval workflows that adapt to different spend types and amounts.This means expenses are controlled in real time, without finance having to play the bad cop and without employees getting stuck in frustrating back-and-forth approvals.

Of course, even with policies in place, finance leaders can’t make informed decisions if they don’t have live visibility into company spend. That’s where real-time data comes in.

3. Get real-time visibility across all spend

Month-end close is about reconciling a point in time. But visibility shouldn’t only happen once a month. Finance leaders need a live, continuous view of spend.

That’s where Airwallex makes the difference. Instead of juggling spreadsheets and disconnected tools, you get a single dashboard that updates in real time. Corporate cards, employee expenses, bill payments, and purchase orders all flow into the same system. This gives you complete visibility across every type of spend without manual reconciliation or CSV downloads.

After moving to Airwallex, all transactions sync directly with Xero and feed into a single view. The finance team can now answer spending questions instantly. They can make informed budget calls using up-to-date data, and close the books without the painstaking manual effort that once consumed hours each week.

The shift is clear: month-end close gives you accuracy, but real-time visibility gives you control. Procurement and payments can’t live in silos, and Airwallex brings them together.

4. Connect procurement directly to payments

Instead of relying on disconnected systems, finance teams can link procurement and accounts payable in one platform. Teams can create and approve purchase orders directly in Airwallex, track committed spend, and see billing progress without waiting for reports to be compiled. OCR and AI reduce the need for manual data entry, while flexible approval workflows ensure that the right people are always in the loop.

Every PO carries a clear audit trail, and finance can view how much of each order has been billed at any point in time. Transactions sync automatically with NetSuite and other accounting systems, so vendor spend is always visible. With everything in one place, finance teams can act early to control budgets, avoid errors, and close the books with less stress.

Once everything from expenses to procurement flows through a single system, finance can finally get ahead of surprises, reduce stress, and spend their energy guiding strategy instead of putting out fires.

5. Scale finance impact from admin to strategy

When you combine faster closes, built-in policy control, real-time visibility, and connected procurement, the payoff is bigger than time saved – it’s a complete shift in how finance operates.

Instead of being buried in admin work, finance teams can finally breathe, plan ahead, and feel confident they’re steering the business in the right direction. When these pieces work together, finance stops firefighting and starts shaping the future of the business.

Each of these improvements builds toward a bigger transformation: freeing finance from manual admin so they can scale their impact across the business.

From reactive to strategic finance

Manual expense management forces finance teams into an endless cycle of chasing receipts, cleaning data, and fixing errors after the fact. This cycle is exhausting, inefficient, and can wear down even the most resilient teams. Airwallex flips that model on its head by building automation, visibility, and policy control into every step of the process.

With Airwallex Expense Management, month-end becomes faster. Policies are enforced automatically, spend visibility is always real time, procurement connects seamlessly to payments, and finance finally has the tools to scale with the business.