The true cost of processing expense claims for UK businesses

Ask a finance manager what expense claims cost the business and you will usually get a shrug and a sigh. The shrug is because nobody has added it up. The sigh is because they know it is more than it looks. This article adds it up for a UK or Irish business of 20 to 150 people, shows every assumption, and explains why the number you may have seen quoted elsewhere is probably the wrong one.

What the manual process looks like from the inside

If you run expenses on spreadsheets, paper forms or an ageing tool, you already know the shape of the month. Someone in finance sends the "expenses due Friday" email. Half the claims arrive. The rest trickle in after a second, more pointed email, and a couple arrive after the ledger has been closed for the month. Each one has to be checked, keyed into the accounts system, and matched against the corporate card statement by eye. Receipts are missing, blurry, or attached to the wrong line. A manager approves a batch without opening a single image because there are forty of them and it is 6pm.

This is not just a Costrix observation. The pattern shows up in every UK survey on the subject, with the caveat that nearly all of those surveys are commissioned by vendors selling a fix:

• In a vendor-commissioned 2024 Airwallex survey of 500 UK finance leaders, 45% still relied on spreadsheets for expenses and 57% still used paper forms.
• In a vendor-commissioned 2025 ExpenseIn/AccountsIQ survey of 500 UK employees, 28% were chased for missing receipts weekly and 10% daily. Just under half (49%) paid for work costs out of their own pocket.
• A vendor-commissioned 2023 American Express survey put UK SMEs at 11 hours a month on expense management, with around £300 a month lost to errors.
• Capture Expense's analysis of 371,381 real UK claims across 460 organisations found 27% took more than 30 days to approve, and 78% of rejections were for vague or incomplete information. That is platform data from customers who had already gone digital, so a manual process is unlikely to do better.

An Irish accountancy practice, First Accounts, puts the finance-side frustration bluntly: "the bookkeeping team spends their time chasing instead of controlling."

Why the "$58 per expense report" figure is shaky

Search for the cost of processing expense claims and you will find $58 per report almost everywhere. It comes from a 2015 GBTA Foundation survey run with HRS, which also produced the "one in five reports contains errors" and "$52 and 18 minutes to correct each" claims. It is an often-cited estimate rather than a piece of research you can check: no sample size or method was published, it modelled a single-night hotel report, and the respondents were large global companies, mostly in the United States.

That does not make it useless, but it is a poor benchmark for a 50-person business in Leeds or Cork, for three reasons:

1. US large-corporate labour costs and process overheads are not yours. A multi-line report at a global firm passes through more hands than a receipt for a train ticket at an SME.
2. It is eleven years old. Pay, tools and habits have changed.
3. It bundles things you may not do at all, such as formal audit sampling and travel policy checks.

Other analyst numbers exist ($35 per report from Aberdeen Group, $15 to $25 manual from Levvel Research) but the originals are gated or vendor-sponsored, so we treat them as a range rather than a fact. What a UK SME should use instead is its own arithmetic: minutes per claim for each person who touches it, multiplied by what those people cost per hour. That is what follows.

A worked example: a 50-person firm

Assume 50 staff, of whom 25 claim something in a typical month, at 3 claims each, giving 75 claims a month. Assume loaded hourly costs of £28 for a general employee, £38 for a line manager and £25 for a finance assistant, and £38 for the accountant doing the month-end reconciliation. The "after" column is what a well-run capture-and-approve app achieves; the assumptions and their sources are in the next section.

That is about £12,000 a year in staff time for a 50-person firm, before any of the non-time costs below. Put another way, the fully loaded manual cost works out at around £17 per claim, and around £13 of that is recoverable. Both are well under the famous $58, which is exactly the point: a smaller, honest number you can defend in front of your managing director is worth more than a big one you cannot.

Scaling the same assumptions linearly:

Every figure in both tables is an estimate. If your claimants, claim counts or hourly rates differ, change them and the total moves in proportion.

How we worked this out

Every assumption below is deliberately on the low side, so that the total is easier to defend than to attack.

• 50% of staff claim in a typical month. Three UK surveys (Pleo, Barclaycard, ExpenseIn) found 48 to 49% of employees use personal money for work costs. Conservative because it ignores company-card holders who still need to submit receipts.
• 3 claims per claimant per month. Pleo/Censuswide's 2022 UK survey found 4 to 5 out-of-pocket transactions a month; we rounded down.
• Employee time: 10 minutes per claim manually, 2 minutes automated. GBTA's 20 minutes was for a multi-line report and Soldo's vendor-commissioned survey found 20 minutes a week; we halved the former. Two minutes leaves room for correcting an auto-read receipt rather than assuming a perfect scan.
• Manager time: 5 minutes, falling to 1. There is no independent UK figure for approval time, so this is a judgement. Five minutes to open an email, find the attachment, check it and reply is modest.
• Finance time: 8 minutes, falling to 2. This is the GBTA all-in figure minus the employee and approver share, a reduction of roughly 75%.
• Rework: 15% of claims, 15 minutes each. GBTA found 19% of reports contain errors costing 18 minutes to fix; both rounded down.
• Reconciliation: 10 hours a month, falling to 3. American Express's survey put UK SMEs at 11 hours a month on expense management overall; a small vendor survey by Ledge found 20 to 50 hours a month on all reconciliations. Ten hours for card statements and close is at the bottom of that range. We also scaled it linearly by headcount, which understates it for larger firms with more cards.
• Hourly rates: £28, £38, £25, £38. ONS ASHE 2025 median full-time pay is £19.67 an hour (£39,039 a year). Reed's August 2026 averages are £31,150 for a finance assistant and £49,641 for a management accountant. We divided annual salary by 1,650 productive hours and added 25% for employer National Insurance (15% above £5,000 from HMRC's 2026/27 thresholds), pension and overheads. Salaries are advertised rather than paid, which is why these rates are rounded rather than precise.

Caveats worth printing every time: most of the survey figures are vendor-commissioned; the GBTA number is 2015, American and large-corporate; and there is no independent UK benchmark for claims per employee or approval minutes. Fraud and padding are real (the ACFE estimates organisations lose around 5% of revenue to occupational fraud) but we have left them out of the headline maths because that figure covers all fraud globally, not expenses in the UK.

The costs that are not staff time

The time table is only part of the story. Three further costs are harder to see on a payslip but easier to feel.

Unclaimed expenses

In a vendor-commissioned 2025 Weavr/Censuswide survey, 75% of UK workers had missed a claim and the average loss was about £90 per employee per year. Across 50 staff that is £4,500 a year that your people are quietly paying for the privilege of working for you. It is their money, not the company's, but it is the kind of thing that comes up in exit interviews. A 2018 Barclaycard poll found a third of workers had lost receipts, which is the main reason claims never get made.

Unrecoverable VAT

HMRC allows input VAT to be reclaimed only against a valid VAT invoice, and for purchases of £250 or under a simplified invoice must still show the supplier's VAT number, the rate and the gross total. A card-terminal slip is not enough. On a £30 standard-rated meal, that is £5 of VAT you cannot reclaim without the receipt; more generally, one-sixth of the gross on every standard-rated purchase whose receipt has gone missing. If a quarter of receipts are lost or never submitted, which is the floor across three UK surveys, the VAT leak alone can rival the time cost. A vendor-commissioned 2021 SAP Concur survey of 500 UK finance leaders found 25% did not reclaim VAT at all when employees submitted missing or incorrect information. We cover the receipt rules in detail in a companion article on VAT receipts for employee expenses.

Slow reimbursement

The Pleo/Censuswide survey found UK employees took 12 days to submit and then waited 13 days to be paid, about 25 days from spending the money to getting it back. In Airwallex's 2025 survey only 30% were reimbursed within a week. A monthly submit-and-approve cycle can bring that to around seven days. There is no direct saving to the business from paying faster, but there is a real cost to not doing so: people stop booking the cheaper advance train ticket because they cannot afford to carry it for a month.

What to look for in a fix

Any tool that promises to remove the manual cost has to remove the specific minutes in the table above, not just add a nicer form. Here is what each row needs, and what Costrix does against it, stated plainly.

• Employee minutes come from finding the receipt, reading it and typing it in. Costrix photographs the receipt, crops it automatically (or shows a crop screen if it is not confident rather than saving a bad one), and reads the merchant, date, total, VAT amount and VAT number. The person confirms one pre-filled screen, on which any field the reader was unsure about is marked in amber for them to check rather than left to pass silently. Receipts with no VAT information are accepted, not blocked.
• Late submission is what stretches month-end. Costrix groups receipts by month and submits the whole month in one tap, telling the person exactly what is holding anything back, such as "needs a category".
• Manager minutes come from opening attachments and chasing. The team month list shows who has and has not submitted, with a one-click Chase that sends a polite email linking to the person's month. Approvals show the receipt image beside each line, can be done all at once, and small claims under a per-category limit approve automatically. There is more on this in how to stop chasing expense receipts at month-end.
• Reconciliation hours come from matching card lines to receipts by eye. Costrix imports corporate card statement PDFs (HSBC's layout is supported today), matches lines to receipts automatically where the amount and date agree, suggests near matches for finance to confirm, and pushes any charge with no receipt onto the cardholder's own month page so finance never has to email about it. See how to reconcile company credit card statements faster.
• Finance keying is replaced by a CSV export of approved expenses with per-person, per-category and per-cost-centre summaries, ready for the ledger. Costrix does not integrate directly with Xero, Sage or QuickBooks; native posting to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations is on the roadmap.

Does it pay for itself?

Costrix Starter is £8 per user per month (20% off on annual billing). For the 50-person firm in the table, that is about £400 a month against an estimated £1,000 a month of recovered staff time, before VAT recovery and the softer costs above. For 20 staff it is £160 against about £400; for 150 staff, £1,200 against about £3,000. Those are estimates built on the assumptions listed earlier, and the honest way to test them is to substitute your own numbers. The pricing page has the plan details.

What to do next

Take the first table, replace our assumptions with your headcount, your claim counts and your hourly rates, and see what your own number is. If it is anything like ours, the fastest way to check whether the "after" column is realistic is to run a month with real receipts. Costrix offers a 7-day free trial on every plan, with nothing charged for the first week and the option to cancel at any time. Start your free trial and put your own month through it.