Building the business case for expense automation with PEX

Finance teams live and die by corporate card rebates, but those rebates mask the real cost of managing spend. They don’t account for the time finance teams spend chasing receipts, correcting miscoded transactions or reconciling data at month-end.

That time has real costs that rarely show up cleanly on a balance sheet. Manual processes, poor spend visibility and after-the-fact rework are spread across teams and systems, making them easy to overlook and hard to quantify.

That’s the gap the commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of PEX, the Total Economic Impact™ study of PEX (2025), set out to address. By analyzing how organizations approached expense management before and after adopting PEX, the analysis puts concrete numbers around productivity, cost avoidance and scale:

• $1.07M in total risk-adjusted, quantified benefits over three years
• 8,700 hours saved in Year 3 through reduced manual effort
• $209K in avoided AP hiring costs as transaction volume increased

The Total Economic Impact™ study of PEX

The study quantifies the impact organizations achieved after adopting PEX using Forrester’s established TEI methodology.

How the study was developed

Forrester Consulting conducted in-depth interviews with PEX customers and combined those insights into a composite organization that reflects common workflows, scale and operating conditions. All benefits and costs were adjusted to reflect real-world operating conditions.

What the study measured

Rather than evaluating features, the analysis focuses on operational outcomes. The study examined changes in productivity, reductions in manual work and rework, avoided costs and how well finance teams maintained efficiency as transaction volume and complexity increased.

These results help finance leaders understand where time and cost savings actually come from when expense workflows are modernized. 

What the study reveals about modern expense management

The research looked at how finance teams managed expense workflows before and after adopting PEX. Across interviewed organizations, several consistent patterns emerged.

1. Manual expense processes create hidden operational drag

Before adopting PEX, finance teams reported spending significant time collecting receipts, correcting miscoded transactions and reconciling expenses after purchases were completed. This kind of reactive work absorbs finance capacity that could otherwise be directed toward analysis, forecasting and strategic planning.

2. Delayed visibility weakens financial control

Transaction data was frequently reviewed only after the fact. Without real-time enforcement, policy compliance depended on reminders and follow-ups rather than embedded controls. That delay shifted enforcement into the reconciliation phase and increased operational friction. 

3. Fragmented data slows the close

Incomplete or disconnected expense documentation added friction during month-end close. Over time, these small inefficiencies compound, extending close timelines and increasing the effort required to maintain accurate financial records.

4. Efficiency gains hold as organizations scale

After adopting PEX, finance teams reported fewer manual touchpoints and more consistent transaction data flowing into accounting systems. These efficiency improvements held even as transaction volume and organizational complexity increased.

The financial impact of expense automation

The business case for expense automation goes beyond reducing administrative work. It’s about protecting finance capacity and maintaining efficiency as transaction volume grows. 

Reducing manual expense work allows finance teams to redirect time away from routine processing without adding headcount as spend volume increases.

Operational improvements translate into financial impact

For the composite organization modeled in the study, those efficiency improvements produced measurable financial outcomes:

• 8,700 hours saved in Year 3 through reduced manual effort across expense processing
• $788,000 in three-year present value from productivity gains
• $209,492 in avoided AP hiring costs as workload scaled without proportional staff growth

Taken together, the study calculated more than $1.07 million in total quantified benefits over three years. 

Durable efficiency matters as organizations scale

Interviewees reported improvements in close efficiency, with the composite organization reducing month-end close effort by 192 hours per year. Finance teams maintained performance even as transaction volume and organizational complexity increased by approximately 25% year over year.

Several operational improvements make these gains sustainable:

• More consistent transaction data, reducing downstream cleanup
• Fewer policy exceptions, limiting rework and back-and-forth
• Stronger alignment between spend documentation and reporting

As organizations scale, transaction volume typically increases faster than finance headcount. Systems that reduce manual oversight allow finance teams to maintain control without expanding operational workload.

How finance teams translate efficiency gains into capacity

Finance leaders often translate benchmark results into a rough order-of-magnitude view for their own organization.

Example scenario aligned with the TEI composite organization:

• ~130 employees
• ~85 Cardholders
• ~8,700 hours saved in Year 3 (TEI finding)

That equates to roughly:

• ~100 hours saved per Cardholder per year, or
• ~700+ hours per month across the organization

At a fully loaded finance cost of $50-$60 per hour, that level of time redirection equates to roughly $420K-$520K in annual productivity value, before accounting for avoided hiring or downstream efficiency gains.

This kind of quick estimate helps finance leaders compare their current workload with the conditions modeled in the study.

Where the efficiency gains come from

Efficiency gains in expense management come from eliminating the manual steps that typically happen during reconciliation. PEX embeds these controls directly into the expense workflow so transactions arrive in accounting systems already coded, documented and approved.

• Automatic GL coding

PEX’s Auto Tagger applies predefined coding rules to transactions based on criteria such as merchant, job or card type. This reduces the time finance teams spend manually categorizing transactions and correcting miscoded expenses during reconciliation.

• Policy enforcement during the transaction

With Auto Enforcer, cards are blocked when receipt or policy requirements are not met. Instead of relying on follow-up emails after a purchase, documentation issues are addressed while the transaction is still active.

• Structured approval workflows

Auto Approval routes transactions through predefined approval paths, based on roles and spending thresholds. This reduces delays caused by manual routing and limits back-and-forth communication during review.

• Bulk transaction review

PEX also supports batch transaction processing, allowing finance teams to review, approve and export multiple transactions at once. As transaction volume grows, this helps teams maintain efficiency without increasing manual workload.

These workflow changes reduce the number of manual touchpoints across expense management and shift more of the work earlier in the process, before reconciliation begins.

How finance leaders use benchmark data to evaluate expense management

Identifying inefficiency in expense processes isn’t difficult. The challenge is quantifying the impact well enough to evaluate potential improvements and prioritize investment.

Finance leaders often look at several areas when assessing the potential impact of improving expense workflows:

• Time and capacity

Productivity metrics help quantify how much staff time is absorbed by manual expense processing and where that time could be redirected toward higher-value finance activities such as analysis, forecasting or business support.

• Staffing and scale

Avoided hiring costs provide a way to evaluate whether existing processes can support organizational growth without requiring additional finance headcount.

• Close and reporting pressure

Measured reductions in close effort help finance teams assess potential improvements to reporting timelines, financial visibility and audit readiness.

These benchmarks give finance leaders a practical way to compare their current expense workflows with the conditions modeled in the study.

What finance leaders should take from the TEI study

Expense management decisions affect more than how transactions are processed. They influence how much time finance teams spend on manual reconciliation, how quickly financial data becomes reliable for reporting and how easily organizations can scale oversight as operations grow.

The TEI study quantifies the time savings, productivity gains and avoided hiring costs organizations achieved after modernizing their expense workflows.

Finance leaders evaluating expense management options can review the full study for a deeper look at the methodology behind these findings. For teams assessing how similar changes might affect their environment, book a PEX demo for a closer view of how these processes work in practice.