A survey of 300 UK chief financial officers has found that finance teams at companies with annual turnover above £20 million are spending a significant share of their working week (over an hour each day) on manual administrative tasks.
The research was commissioned by Corpay, a US-listed corporate payments company. It was conducted by Censuswide and included in Corpay’s Card-First Approach to Spend Modernisation whitepaper, published in April.
Main survey findings
- 86% of respondents said their finance teams spend six or more hours per person, per week on administration covering expenses, invoices, and supplier payments.
- 83% of CFOs said their spend management processes are more manual than they believe they should be.
- 84% said their organisation has been slow to modernise its payment processes.
- 85% said current processes increase the risk of error, fraud, or off-policy spend.
- 91% said they are concerned that competitors are ahead of them in adopting automated payment processes.
When asked what they would do with time saved if administrative workload fell by 25–50%, CFOs said they would focus on business partnering, cash flow forecasting, and strategic planning.
81% of finance leaders said card-led payments offer a competitive advantage, citing improvements in control, visibility, and efficiency.
Piero Macari, VP Product Corporate Payments at Corpay, said: “The Manual Tax is a cost that most finance leaders know exists but have never been able to name. Our research gives it a name and, more importantly, a number. Six hours per person, per week is not a rounding error. Across a finance team, across a year, it represents a significant and measurable drag on both productivity and strategic capacity.”
The survey results come as UK businesses face growing pressure to digitise their financial record-keeping. Besides the waste of time and money involved in manual record management, UK Finance’s Annual Fraud Report 2025 recorded a 19% surge in fraud cases over the past year, with £1.7 billion lost to fraudsters. Finance automation tools are cited by vendors as one way to reduce exposure to payment fraud and off-policy spend. In particular, automation tools prevent companies from paying fake invoices or duplicate payments, monitor transactions in real time to spot unusual patterns, ensure transparency and limit the risk of internal record tampering.
