Aligning Finance and Procurement to improve expense management for financial forecasting and control — Phase 1: Understanding the foundations

In the Executive Summary to this use case series on ‘Improving Expense Management for Financial Forecasting and Control,’ we outlined five phases to help organizations improve forecasting accuracy and financial control by aligning finance and procurement in the management of employee-driven expenses, particularly travel, reimbursements and corporate card spend.

For Phase 1, establishing a shared understanding of expense management priorities is essential for meaningful collaboration.

Phase 1: Understanding the foundations

While finance focuses on forecasting precision and budget control, procurement prioritizes usability, policy enforcement and employee compliance. These differing goals can create disconnects across systems, workflows and responsibilities, which ultimately undermine spend visibility, delay financial reporting and weaken cost control.

Let’s take a closer look at the distinct priorities of each function.

This article isn’t intended to provide the answer. It is intended to help finance and procurement teams start the conversation and find better ways to work together.

Finance’s expense management priorities

The finance function approaches employee expense management as a critical component of financial accuracy, risk mitigation and planning agility. Core priorities include:

• Ensuring timely and accurate reporting of employee-submitted expenses, including corporate card transactions and reimbursement requests.
• Improving forecast accuracy by integrating variable and decentralized expenses into monthly and quarterly planning cycles.
• Strengthening cost center visibility by aligning individual expenses with budgets, departments and project codes.
• Reducing manual accruals and late entries by accelerating approval cycles and minimizing delays in submission.
• Maintaining internal control and audit readiness through standardized expense policies and consistent enforcement across business units.
• Supporting financial planning with real-time expense data integration and automated workflows that reduce reliance on manual estimates.

When this visibility is lacking, finance must rely on assumptions and estimates, which can create a ripple effect of inaccuracies in forecasting, cash flow planning and resource allocation.

Procurement’s expense management priorities

Procurement, while not typically responsible for financial reporting, owns many of the tools and processes that shape how employees incur and manage expenses. Key procurement priorities include:

• Developing enforceable and employee-friendly T&E policies that balance control with flexibility and support overall spend management goals.
• Managing relationships with platform providers and travel services to embed cost-effective options in the employee experience.
• Driving adoption of approved tools and processes to reduce non-compliant behaviors and capture spend in a centralized, auditable system.
• Monitoring compliance trends and usage data to identify policy gaps, training needs or areas for policy refinement.
• Improving the employee experience by simplifying the expense submission and approval process across devices and channels.
• Ensuring employee-driven spend is digitized and categorized at the point of entry, particularly for card transactions and reimbursement workflows.

Procurement’s role is essential in creating an expense ecosystem that encourages consistent usage, controls costs and supports both employees and finance teams with accurate, structured data.

Why alignment matters

Strategic alignment between finance and procurement unlocks better spend visibility, stronger compliance and greater forecasting confidence.

As highlighted in Understanding the Foundations – CFO Initiatives and CPO Alignment Strategies, “When procurement strategies align with finance-led initiatives organizations gain greater financial visibility, improved efficiency and stronger risk control.”

This alignment is particularly critical in expense management, where both functions share responsibilities that directly impact budget control, policy compliance and financial accuracy.

By integrating procurement’s operational insights into financial planning and forecasting processes organizations can:

• Improve forecast reliability by capturing and standardizing employee expense data across systems.
• Eliminate reimbursement delays through automated workflows and policy-driven approval routing.
• Enhance budget visibility by embedding real-time expense activity into financial dashboards and planning tools.
• Leverage categorized card and reimbursement data to identify recurring spend patterns, uncover inefficiencies and inform budget planning and policy updates.

Key takeaway

Finance and procurement must work as strategic partners to elevate expense management from an operational necessity to a strategic advantage. By aligning systems, policies and performance expectations organizations can move beyond reactive reporting to proactive financial planning. This partnership enables greater control over employee-driven spend, reduces compliance risk and makes expense data a reliable input into forecasting models.

In an environment where agility, accuracy and accountability are essential to financial resilience, aligning these two functions is not just beneficial; it is essential to building a scalable, insight-driven approach to managing expenses across the enterprise.

Next up

Phase 2 – Identifying common misalignments in expense management: Breaking down where process gaps and functional silos create unnecessary friction, risk and forecasting errors.

More in the Finance-Procurement alignment series:

Strengthening cash flow management and liquidity

Visit our in-depth guide to aligning Finance and Procurement for wider coverage