The East of England is one of the UK’s most economically dynamic regions, but many companies struggle to track spending.
According to EY’s 2025 UK Regional Economic Forecast, London and the East of England are the only two regions expected to grow faster than the national average, with GVA growth of 1.7% forecast between 2025 and 2028.
A KPMG survey reports 86% of private businesses in the region are confident about their growth prospects for 2026.
However, with growth comes greater complexity – more headcounts, more suppliers, more spending to track.
Between Cambridge’s life sciences cluster, Silicon Fen’s 5,000-plus knowledge-intensive companies, BT’s global R&D headquarters at Adastral Park in Ipswich, and emerging tech hubs in Chelmsford and Colchester, there’s a wealth of ambition.
But professional ambition and financial reality often don’t complement one another. Ask most finance leaders whether they know where their company’s money is going in real time, and the honest answer is no. The more interesting question is why.
The first reason is structural. Most finance teams rely on ERP and accounting systems built for reporting, not visibility. They are designed to produce a correct picture at month-end, not ad hoc insights. Replacement is expensive, disruptive and difficult, so most organisations tolerate the gap – managing risk they can’t fully see because the alternative feels harder than the problem.
The second reason is the reimbursement model itself. Traditional expense management is built around a claim-after-the-fact workflow: employees spend their own money, collect a receipt, submit a form and wait for repayment.
That sequence is so deeply embedded in professional culture that it’s rarely questioned, yet it is fundamentally incompatible with real-time visibility. By the time any spend enters the system, it has already happened.
A survey of 500 senior finance executives at UK-headquartered businesses found that 57% of organisations still manage corporate expenses using paper forms, and 45% rely on spreadsheets – not because finance leaders are unaware of better options, but because the workflow that surrounds those tools is rarely reviewed.
The third reason is organisational fragmentation. In many businesses, finance tools have been adopted department by department. No single team has full visibility, and because each department’s system serves its own purposes, no one owns the problem. The result is a patchwork that creates the appearance of oversight without the substance.
The fourth reason is more subtle: a lack of trust in the data itself. Some finance leaders are reluctant to act on real-time dashboards because they know how fragmented the underlying systems are. Surfacing incomplete or inconsistent data in real time feels riskier than waiting for a reconciled month-end figure that everyone agrees on. This caution preserves a false sense of control while leaving actual spend unmonitored for weeks at a time.
These structural problems carry a specific regional cost. Research from Funding Circle and the Small Business Commissioner estimates that 1,350 East of England businesses closed in 2024 as a direct result of unpaid invoices – fourth highest nationally.
FreeAgent’s invoice data consistently ranks Ipswich as one of the UK’s best-performing postcodes for timely payments – yet even there, 31.5% of invoices were paid late in the most recent 12-month period.
When finance teams cannot see committed spend in real time, late payment exposure becomes even harder to manage. A supplier invoice sitting unprocessed for a week, combined with an expense claim approved a fortnight later, can push a business into difficulty before the month-end numbers arrive.
Employee impact compounds this further. A survey of 2,000 UK workers found that 2 in 5 encountered financial difficulty while waiting for expense reimbursement. In a labour market where Cambridge and Peterborough combined accounted for 68.5% of all online job adverts across the region in 2024, and where life sciences and tech roles attract national competition, slow reimbursement is a retention issue as much as a finance one.
The British Business Bank’s 2024 Nations and Regions Tracker found that the East of England recorded one of the strongest regional increases in external finance use among smaller businesses. That appetite makes accurate internal financial data more important, not less, as lenders and investors require a clear, timely picture of spend before they commit.
When the picture only becomes clear at month-end close, it’s already too late. Spending decisions have been made, budget lines crossed, and policy exceptions have gone unnoticed. Finance can report what happened but cannot change it.
A shift away from “tried and true” can be risky, however it tends to expose how much of our “baked-in” business processes have been designed for a pre-digital era.
Modern technologies exist, are mostly accessible to businesses of every size, and typically cost far less than the exposure they remove. The harder part, it turns out, is deciding that the status quo is worth questioning.
This is why automated expense management software has become a business-critical capability for firms across high-value sectors.
