Marne Martin is CEO of Emburse, a global leader in travel and expense management.
Finance has historically commanded a reputation as a disciplinarian. Recently, however, I’ve noticed a shift in their approach to spend stewardship. After years of maintaining strict budgets, approval workflows and vendor lists to enforce spend management, the department of “no” is starting to dismantle some of its own rules.
Finance leaders are having moments of reckoning with the very spending policies they so carefully crafted. They’re using AI-powered spend analytics to look not only at the line item but the full context surrounding it. They’re working closer with IT leaders to configure the right systems and translate what the technology sees into terms finance can act on. What they’re finding within their spend data and reimagined processes is prompting some surprising and counterintuitive decisions—some that defy their own conventions.
I’ve heard versions of this phenomenon from customers across industries, and the pattern is consistent: the more you use spend analytics to see total cost, the more you realize some rules might be worth revisiting. Here are three stories from the field about finance leaders doing just that.
Rule 1. Push As Much Spend As Possible Through The PO Process
Many organizations still consider routing expenses through the purchase order (PO) process as basic financial hygiene. It creates a paper trail, ensures budget availability and gives finance a mechanism for catching rogue spend. But some companies are deciding to buck this rule. They’re discovering channels like corporate cards offer just as much control, often enforcing policy, completing fraud checks automatically and saving everyone time and paperwork.
I know of a power generation company that took a hard look at its purchasing process and found that forcing everything through POs wasn’t always in the business’s best interest. Certain categories of spend could move much faster outside the PO workflow without meaningfully increasing financial risk. The clerical burden involved with maintaining a rigid purchasing process outweighed the potential risk all the extra controls were meant to catch.
It also noted a quality of work life increase after lifting the restriction. Employees appreciated the ability to push low-risk expenses through other channels and get them approved quickly; the finance department was free to focus on more critical POs.
Rule 2. Require Receipts
Here’s another unquestioned financial hygiene tactic: employees need to submit receipts to be reimbursed for eligible expenses. Finance needs documentation that employee purchases are legitimate and within policy for compliance and reporting purposes. But that documentation comes with a processing cost, both for the employees managing receipts on the road and for the finance teams verifying them on the back end. Three companies I spoke with recently discovered they could maintain the same level of compliance with less laborious receipt requirements.
The power generation company who relaxed its PO requirement did the same for its paper receipt rule. Digital receipt capture made paper copies redundant and AI-enabled Optical Character Recognition (OCR) transcription provided all the fraud controls they needed. OCR, in fact, can identify signs of manipulation on a digital receipt invisible to the human eye.
A law firm and a higher education institution both stopped requiring receipts for travel-related expenses under $25. Their finance teams were spending a significant amount of time reviewing travel expenses that, according to their spend data, were already pre-approved. For companies processing a high volume of expenses below the IRS’s $75 mandatory reporting threshold, sometimes the juice is simply not worth the squeeze.
Rule 3. Review Every Expense
Two other law firms found a different solution to their high volume, low-dollar expense approval problem. In analyzing their spend data, they noticed a general increase in T&E expenses and high variance in costs between similar trips. Such unpredictable expenses consumed significant review time and complicated budget planning.
Rather than monitoring expenses more closely, both firms introduced per diem limits. One remarked that giving employees higher limits and more autonomy actually made them more careful spenders. Employees may struggle to remember exactly what’s allowed in different T&E categories, but they certainly remember they have $65 per day to spend and budget themselves accordingly.
Both firms noted that shifting the burden of enforcement away from employees and onto AI-enabled tools improved compliance. AI can oversee employee expenses more effectively than humans can—automatically enforcing policy while flagging risks that actually warrant attention, like unusual patterns or duplicate or out-of-policy submissions.
Rule Breaking Isn’t Always A Rebellion
I don’t think these finance leaders are abandoning discipline—quite the opposite. I think they’re applying it more precisely.
Finance’s core objective has always centered on getting the most value from every dollar the business spends. Their former expense policies used to help these companies achieve that objective. These policies were built for the information environment that existed when they were written. But now, AI has given finance teams new and more accurate signals into whether employee spend is compliant and under control. They have what they’ve always needed to do their job well: a complete, real-time picture of where money is going and what it’s producing.
With AI-enabled spend insights, finance can see the distinction between rules that actually serve the business and ones that just look like they should, and revise their policies accordingly. That visibility has only materialized through IT and finance teams working from the same framework. When your CIO can show your CFO how many instances of expense fraud the system prevented or how much back-office processing time it saved, your technology investments become a source of financial intelligence. To me, working from a place of insight signals discipline at the highest level.
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