Keeping track of your spend can be difficult if you don’t have the right tools. We take you through the spend management process, the common challenges your finance team might face, and how you can solve them.
Spend management is the end-to-end process of handling business costs. This includes employee expenses, accounts payable and recording your payments in your accounting software.
To manage your spend step-by-step you should:
There are several challenges you and your team might face when it comes to managing spend. Later in this article, we’ll take you through how you avoid these with a streamlined spend management solution.
Scattered spend: When your spend is spread across different platforms and processes you can waste valuable time bringing it together or miss out on crucial costs due to lack of visibility.
Complicated expense policies: If you don’t have a clear policy or intuitive tools, employees can get confused. You may need to chase receipts, struggle with incomplete information, or end up with expenses that are out of the scope of your policy.
Making mistakes: Human error is common when you’re doing manual processes like matching or inputting transactions. Along with this being really time consuming, you could also be left questioning whether your data is correct.
High costs: If you can’t see all your spend clearly, you could be paying for things you don’t need. Legacy subscriptions, unexpected charges or unnecessary expenses could be hiding from view when you don’t have the right visibility.
Which right spend management solution is right for you will depend on your business needs. It’s important to find the right platform for your size and industry, perform a cost-benefit analysis, and understand how the solution can grow with your business to help you scale.
Using the right tools and setting up good processes can streamline your spend management, increase accuracy and save you valuable time which you can spend on high value tasks instead.
Juni is a spend management solution built for modern commerce, and designed to provide you with the tools and flexible capital you need to help you grow. Let’s take a look at how a solution like Juni can help you manage your spend efficiently.
Generally banks don’t offer spend management, and spend management solutions don’t offer features like virtual cards, business accounts or capital financing. So, this means you’re forced to create multiple accounts just to control your finances.
Managing your spend between several different platforms can be really challenging. It increases the risk of error, means more manual admin and can also incur higher costs.
But, this doesn’t have to be the case. Instead, you can simplify the process by choosing a spend management solution like Juni that brings it all together.
Playtech startup Boxbollen faced just this challenge. They switched to Juni which allowed them to track their spend in one place – and saw the benefits. “Being able to manage your payments, ad spend, and invoicing and credit within the same environment saves us a huge amount of time where previously we had to manage this on several different platforms,” says Jacob Eriksson, Co-Founder at Boxbollen. See how Boxbollen manages their seasonal spend.
To really have visibility of your business spend, you should have everything in one place:
Increased visibility can also help with reporting, giving you a clear overview to make informed decisions for your business. If you want to optimise your spend, unifying your payments in one intuitive dashboard can give you the information you need to spot trends, discover where you need to cut costs or where you can afford to invest for growth.
Employee expenses are a large part of spend management. A key part of implementing a good expense management policy is having the right tools to enable employee spend and ensure you don’t have an overwhelming amount of manual admin.
Virtual cards are an excellent way to distribute budget ownership, making each employee responsible for the expenses that go through their card – including their receipts. Virtual cards mean there’s no need for reimbursement, giving a smoother experience to both employees and finance teams.
The team at travel brand Carl Friedrik were looking for a way to improve managing their expenses and make financial admin more efficient, then they found Juni. “Having individual cards for our team members has not only made it easier to manage expenses but has also significantly enhanced financial efficiency and transparency by aiding in receipt tracking,” says Paulina Lejarza, Marketing Executive at Carl Friedrik. See how Carl Friedrink manage their expenses.
Handling receipts manually is a really time consuming process. So, choose a software that makes it simple for your employees to manage their receipts instead. With Juni, you can easily capture receipts and invoices by sending them to a receipt inbox or auto-collecting receipts from an email account.
Mobile payments can also enable expenses on the go, which not only allows you to track expenses in real time, but also makes it simple to capture receipts by snapping a picture.
Control is another key element of employee expense management, so make sure you can set controls to monitor, limit or block spend at card level.
For more information on how to set up an employee expenses policy, check out our guide.
Accounts payable (AP), like marketing and inventory spend, have a different set of needs from employee expenses, although there are some similarities.
Virtual cards can also offer a solution for accounts payable. When you can create an unlimited number of virtual cards, it’s up to you how you distribute them. For example, you can create cards for different subscriptions or marketing channels.
NUDIENT, a fashion tech brand, did just that. “Juni has enabled us to be highly agile in setting up new ad channels fast by providing different cards for each channel,” says Anton Höjding, Chief Marketing Officer at NUDIENT.
Settling your invoices can be simplified with automation. Juni collects and scans your invoices automatically and pre-fills all the important payment details. Then, pay your invoices in a few clicks including bulk payments, and schedule payments for any upcoming invoices too.
Sending and receiving money efficiently and in a cost effective way is another step in simplifying your AP. With Juni you can manage and move your money effortlessly with IBAN accounts in multiple currencies and low FX fees, and pay suppliers Europe, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and the US with fast and secure SEPA and SWIFT transfers (for EEA customers only).
NUDIENT have also streamlined processing their invoices by centralising their ad spend. “Using Juni is time-saving for us. Instead of having to process invoices from multiple suppliers every month, we only need to transfer money to our Juni account a few times each month,” says Anton. See how NUDIENT can move fast with efficient financial admin.
Automation can also play a key role in simplifying your accounts payable process.
Automating aspects of spend management can help you reduce errors and have faster financial admin.
Integrations like payment gateways, bank accounts, accounting software and storefronts like Amazon and Shopify can bring all your data together in one place, simplifying reporting and giving you an accurate view of your finances.
ANI Jewels have automated many of their processes with Juni, from inventory to expense management. “We integrated Juni with our accounting software, Fortnox, and our bank, Nordea, creating a cohesive system to automatically sync financial data across platforms. This has eliminated manual data entry errors and provided a real-time view of our financials,” says Tomaj.
Automated receipt and invoice matching can save a huge amount of time compared to doing this manually. Juni Match pulls and matches receipts and paid invoices at the click of a button. You can connect your Gmail account to auto-collect receipts from Meta, Shopify, Klaviyo and TikTok. You can also automatically import your receipts and invoices with your dedicated Juni inbox, and we automatically fill in the information via OCR for effortless spend management.
Doing your accounting is the final step of spend management. Although this may be handled in an accounting software like Fortnox or an ERP like Netsuite, there’s several ways your spend management solution can help you prepare and streamline the process.
Accounting integrations, like Juni’s two way integration with Fortnox, can make handling your transactions effortless. Pull dimensions, set up custom rules, tax codes and sync transactions to reduce manual admin.
Pre-accounting can help prepare your data for export, and save you time doing your bookkeeping in your accounting software. Create custom dimensions and effortlessly assign them to transactions, either individually or in bulk. Specify accounts, project codes, cost centres and VAT rates, and assign them to transactions in bulk. This means you can add information to lots of similar transactions at once. See how you can save time with pre-accounting.
Exporting your data needs to be effortless. Juni offers export via CSV or SIE to sync with your bookkeeping or ERP tool. With SIE fields, you can set a custom export format to configure your information to map to your ledgers correctly.
NUDIENT uses Juni’s export to cut down on financial admin. “All of our marketing expenses can be conveniently collected in one platform and then exported and added to our ERP once a month. This makes our bookkeeping process less complicated, as it requires fewer transactions than traditional invoices do,” says Anton.
For more information on how automated accounting workflows can save you time, check out our guide.
Many modern commerce businesses face a similar struggle: how do you bridge the gap between paying for stock and marketing, and recouping the cost with sales?
This challenge can be a big barrier to business growth. Luckily there’s a solution: flexible financing. Jacob, Co-Founder at Boxbollen was not only struggling with bridging this gap, but also with the cash flow challenges posed by scaling a seasonal business. With Juni, he has the capital he needs to continue Boxbollen’s growth trajectory.
“Juni’s credit products* enable us with the ability to grow at scale, whilst having visibility and control over the cost of scaling,” Jacob Eriksson, Co-Founder at Boxbollen.
By having credit and healthy cash flow, you may be able to negotiate better rates with your suppliers by paying upfront. Ultimately, flexible financing could help you increase your profit margins and plan your budget effectively.
The right tools can give you the solution you need to streamline your spend management, save valuable time and increase visibility of your finances. Ultimately, you’ll have all the information you need to make better decisions for your business, and operate cost effectively.
*Credit cards are available for companies registered in UK, NL, SE, DE, FR, ES, IT, NO, and FI, upon eligibility. Invoice credit is available for companies registered in SE, DE, NL, FR, ES, IT, NO and FI, upon eligibility. Fees and terms and conditions apply.
Juni is not a bank – yet. We’re a financial technology company providing e-money services and as such are not part of a deposit guarantee scheme. Learn more about our license and how we keep your business and money safe.
Juni Technology AB (company number 559248-0908) is licensed and registered as an electronic money institution with the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Sw. Finansinspektionen) (license no: 64025). Payment Card Solutions (UK) Limited (company number 05941947) and UAB B4B Payments Europe (company number 305539054) are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (ref: 930619) and the Bank of Lithuania (licence no: 76), respectively. The Juni Mastercard Corporate Card is issued by Payment Card Solutions (UK) Limited and UAB B4B Payments Europe pursuant to a license by Mastercard International Incorporated. Mastercard and the circles design are registered trademarks of Mastercard International Incorporated. Juni Technology AB. Masthamnsgatan 21, 413 28 Göteborg, Sweden. © 2025 Juni. All Rights Reserved.
