More than just payroll - Defining a new way to do expense management with PayFit

Expense management shouldn’t be complicated. But for Finance departments and line managers at UK businesses, it’s often another of those needlessly manual, admin-heavy and time-draining exercises that diverts attention from the big stuff.

But effective expense management is an essential part of the corporate puzzle. When done right, it can have a hugely beneficial impact across teams, freeing up managers’ time and contributing to a positive employee experience.

PayFit’s expenses feature allows UK businesses to manage things simply and efficiently, making it something that you don’t even really need to think about. Let’s look at how.

But first, why is effective expense management so critical for UK businesses?

Effective expense management is critical for several reasons. Firstly, there’s the need for sound financial management. Putting in place robust policies and processes for managing and paying expenses can help provide consistency with incomings and outgoings, to feed into accurate budgeting and forecasting for future spending plans.

There’s the regulatory angle to think of, including being able to clearly distinguish between allowable and disallowable expenses in your records for tax purposes.

And then there’s the People element.

Because, despite appearing to be a menial aspect of running a business, effective expense management can foster a positive employee experience, free up the Finance team’s time and empower managers to own their team’s processes.

Disorganised expense management means lots of back and forth chasing employees for the correct receipts, employees chasing managers to get paid back, the potential for mistakes, and plenty of needless frustration, resentment and time wasted.

What’s the relationship between expense management and payroll?

You may be thinking ‘why is a payroll software provider getting involved in expense management?’

A lot of companies keep expense management and payroll completely separate, but with P11Ds being phased out from the 2026/27 tax year onwards, payrolling benefits will become the only method of doing things. Indeed, it’s already the easiest, as it removes the need for you to complete a P11D on behalf of employees, and provides visibility and clarity on expenses for staff directly on their payslips.

We created our expense management feature as a simple, automated way for submitted and approved expenses to sync up with payroll, and be paid back to employees automatically.

How PayFit helps businesses manage expenses more effectively

Our expenses feature allows businesses to manage things simply and efficiently, and view the impact that spending has on payroll in real-time. In short, it makes managing expenses one less thing to worry about, and is just one of the many payroll-related processes that we help to automate so effectively.

Here’s how.

Making it straightforward for employees

Employees can upload photos or digital receipt files directly into their personal PayFit portal, with optical character recognition to reduce manual data entry and minimise errors. Once approved, any amounts owed are automatically added to the next payslip, ready to be paid along with the next payroll. Employees are automatically notified as and when expenses are approved.

Everything in one place, paper-free and insight-rich 

Piles of paper receipts clogging up Finance’s desks? Gone! Cumbersome spreadsheets full of broken formulas dotted about in your company drive? Eradicated! Receipts, as we alluded to above, are submitted digitally, with all expense requests logged in one place. View a summary of all expenses by month or category (e.g: travel, subsistence, accommodation etc.) to understand their impact on company finances and to create reports for budgeting, forecasting and HMRC submissions.

Empowering managers to free up your time

Business, Finance & HR leaders can assign expense validation and approval rights to line managers, allowing them to take control of their team’s expenses. They’ll be notified of any new claims, can check they meet your expense policy, and then approve or deny them. Simple!

Make expenses - plus your wider payroll and HR efforts - one less thing to worry about by booking a demo with a member of the team below.