Disclosure: I created Bea, a lightweight tool for submitting and approving employee expenses in Telegram. This article reflects my own views on how small businesses should manage employee expenses.
A spreadsheet is an excellent place to develop a process. It is rarely the right place to operate that process indefinitely.
I use Excel and Google Sheets constantly. For financial modelling, cash-flow forecasts, scenario analysis or exploring a question, they are difficult to beat. I can start with an empty sheet, organize the problem as I understand it, change my assumptions and see the consequences.
That freedom is precisely what makes spreadsheets so useful.
It is also why they have survived for so long in places where they no longer belong.
Employee expense management is one of those places.
The spreadsheet was supposed to be temporary
Most spreadsheet-based business processes begin innocently.
A company has a handful of employees who occasionally spend their own money on business expenses. Someone creates a sheet with columns for the date, employee, merchant, amount and reimbursement status.
For the first few months, it works well enough.
Then someone asks for receipts to be attached. The files go into a shared folder. Another employee needs approval, so a new column appears. The company starts reimbursing expenses twice a month, requiring a payment-status column. Finance needs to distinguish company-card transactions from private spending.
Before long, the original spreadsheet has become the centre of a small administrative system.
It has rules, exceptions, permissions, supporting documents, approval decisions and payment states. Much of this exists outside the spreadsheet itself, in emails, shared folders and people’s memories.
The spreadsheet remains at the centre because it is familiar and because extending it is easier than questioning whether it should still be there.
Flexibility becomes a liability when the rules are settled
Financial modelling benefits from freedom.
If I want to add a scenario, create a new assumption or change the structure of a calculation, I should be able to do that immediately. A rigid interface would make the work slower.
Expense management has almost the opposite requirements.
An expense should have a known owner, an amount and currency, supporting evidence and a clear status. Someone may need to approve it. Corrections must be visible. A payment should not be made twice. One employee must not be able to change another employee’s approved amount without authorization.
These are established requirements of a recurring process, not questions we need to reinvent every month.
Once the process is defined, flexibility is no longer the primary advantage. Consistency is.
Consider an approval column in a spreadsheet.
Someone enters “Approved”. Who made the decision? Was that person authorized? What amount did they approve? Did the approval happen before or after the amount changed?
Modern cloud spreadsheets have version histories. Excel and Google Sheets can show changes and identify editors. But the person editing an approval cell is not necessarily the person who made the decision.
An editing history and an approval record answer different questions.
A proper expense process should make those distinctions explicit without requiring someone to reconstruct them.
The hidden job of the finance administrator
There is a reason spreadsheet-based expense processes can appear cheaper than they are.
Much of the work is performed by a person rather than by the system.
Someone receives the receipt, finds the corresponding row, checks whether the employee entered the amount correctly, asks for a missing description, identifies the approver, records the decision and eventually matches the reimbursement to a bank payment.
Often that person is competent and conscientious. The process works because they make it work.
This can create a misleading impression of efficiency.
The company sees a spreadsheet that costs nothing. It does not necessarily see the time required to maintain the relationships between the spreadsheet, the receipts, the decisions and the payments.
When the administrator goes on holiday or leaves the company, everyone discovers how much of the process existed in that person’s head.
The spreadsheet did not fail. It was never doing all the work people thought it was doing.
Of course, dedicated software needs administration too. Someone must configure the process, maintain permissions, handle exceptions and review the claims that require judgment.
The difference is what the administrator spends time doing.
A structured system can maintain the connections between claims, receipts, decisions and payment status. It can enforce required steps and preserve the history of changes. The administrator can concentrate on exceptions and actual decisions rather than repeatedly reconstructing the underlying records.
That does not eliminate work. It changes which work people have to perform.
Employees do not experience expenses as rows
An employee finishes a client meeting, pays for a taxi and receives a receipt.
At that moment, the employee has everything needed to report the expense. The amount is visible, the business purpose is fresh, and the receipt is in hand.
Yet many companies ask the employee to do something later: open a spreadsheet, find the correct tab, complete several columns, upload the receipt somewhere else and notify whoever is responsible.
Sometimes it happens immediately. Often it waits until the end of the week or month.
By then, details have been forgotten. Finance has to ask questions that could have been answered at the time of the transaction.
The usual defence is that everyone knows how to use spreadsheets.
But knowing Excel does not mean knowing a particular company’s expense procedure.
A new employee still needs to understand which file to use, which categories are permitted, where receipts belong, when expenses can be submitted and who approves them. Someone must explain what happens when an amount is wrong, a receipt is missing or an expense was paid using a company card.
The spreadsheet has not removed these rules. It has left their enforcement to people.
Employees already carry smartphones and routinely communicate through messaging apps. Taking a receipt photo and answering a few relevant questions is a natural way to report an expense.
A structured system can turn that interaction into a complete submission, present the information for confirmation and pass it to the responsible person.
The employee does not need to know how the company’s finance records are organized.
The replacement does not have to be another large platform
A small company discovers that its expense spreadsheet is becoming cumbersome. It searches for alternatives and encounters products offering corporate cards, procurement, subscriptions, travel management, invoice processing, budgets and payment services.
Some businesses need these capabilities. Many do not.
Replacing a spreadsheet with a comprehensive finance platform can be an equally poor decision if the company only needs employees to submit expenses and managers to approve them.
The appropriate replacement might be remarkably small.
A structured submission process. Clear confirmation. An attributable approval. A usable record for finance.
Payments can remain with the bank or payroll provider. Accounting can remain in the existing accounting system. The company does not need to replace working infrastructure to solve a receipt-collection problem.
I recognize that this is also the part of expense management Bea is being built to address. My argument is therefore not commercially neutral.
But the underlying requirement exists independently of Bea: a company needs a dependable process, and that process should be proportionate to the problem.
There is another trade-off worth acknowledging. Spreadsheets are portable and familiar. Moving to proprietary software introduces a dependency on a vendor, and retrieving complete historical records can become difficult if the product lacks adequate exports.
That is a legitimate reason to scrutinize a replacement. A company should be able to retrieve its claims, receipts and approval history in usable formats if it leaves the service.
What about the company whose spreadsheet works?
There are exceptions.
Imagine a consulting firm with twelve employees and a handful of monthly expenses. One administrator maintains the register. Approval decisions are retained separately, receipts are properly filed and reimbursements are reconciled.
The process works. Nobody spends hours chasing claims.
Would I tell that company it must immediately buy expense software?
No.
There is little value in replacing a functioning process with a new subscription that creates more work than it removes.
Our practical guides recommend changing only what needs changing. On spreadsheets, I would go further.
I would still question whether the spreadsheet should remain the permanent foundation.
The company depends on someone maintaining the controls that the spreadsheet itself does not provide. That may be acceptable at its current size, but the dependency will become more significant as the business adds employees, approvers and payment methods.
Once the company can move to a structured workflow without creating more administration, I would encourage it to do so.
Keep Excel for the work it does best
I would not want a world without Excel.
I want to build a financial model without asking a software vendor to add another reporting feature. I want to test assumptions, manipulate data and construct forecasts in the way that makes sense to me.
Spreadsheets remain extraordinarily good at this kind of work.
But once an analysis becomes a recurring operational process involving several people, money, permissions and documents, a different set of requirements takes over.
The process needs predictable states, controlled decisions and reliable records. It must work when the person who designed the spreadsheet is unavailable.
The spreadsheet can remain an input, an output or a tool for analysis. It should no longer be the system responsible for running the operation.
For employee expenses, I believe we have already passed that point.
Small companies should not need sophisticated finance infrastructure to handle ordinary employee spending. They need employees to report expenses with minimal effort, managers to make clear decisions and finance to receive information it can trust.
Spreadsheets helped thousands of businesses establish their first expense processes. They were a useful starting point, and some companies continue to operate them successfully.
But we should stop treating them as the natural permanent solution.
Excel deserves its place in financial analysis. Employee expense management deserves a proper workflow.