By Piero Macari, VP Product Corporate Payments, Corpay
In conversations with finance leaders over the past year, one observation has come up more often than almost any other. Not about interest rates, not about AI, not about the latest regulatory change. But about time and specifically, how little of it is left for the work that actually matters.
Our research, conducted among 300 UK CFOs from organisations with annual turnover above £20 million, has put a number on something most finance leaders already feel. 86% of finance teams spend six or more hours per person, per week on administration across expenses, invoices and supplier payments. That is close to a full working day, every week, for every member of the team. And when you look at the distribution behind that headline figure, nearly 30% of finance teams are spending more than 11 hours per person, per week.
I call this the Manual Tax. It does not appear on any budget, it is not tracked as a line item or reviewed in a quarterly business review. But it is being paid, every week, by finance teams across the country and unlike most taxes, it is not fixed. It compounds quietly, absorbing capacity that should be directed elsewhere, until the administrative burden simply becomes the background noise of how finance operates.
Why the moment matters
The timing matters more than ever. Deloitte’s April 2026 UK CFO Survey confirms that cost discipline, liquidity and operational efficiency are firmly back at the top of the agenda for finance leaders, shaped by a more volatile backdrop of geopolitical risk and economic uncertainty. Most of that scrutiny lands on visible costs: headcount, vendor contracts, capital expenditure. However, the Manual Tax is not visible – it does not show up on a dashboard or trigger an alert and that is precisely what makes it significant and what makes it so consistently overlooked.
Our research shows that 83% of finance leaders say their spend processes are still more manual than they should be, while 85% believe current payment processes increase the risk of error, fraud or off-policy spend. These are not fringe concerns but describe the operational reality for the majority of UK finance functions right now, across sectors and organisation sizes.
Where the work comes from
The source of the problem is structural and it is worth being specific about where it sits. In most organisations, payment processes remain disconnected from data capture and control systems. Spend is authorised in one place, recorded in another and reconciled somewhere else entirely. Each handoff in that chain creates friction: approvals to chase, data to re-enter, exceptions to investigate, discrepancies to resolve. Finance professionals with strong analytical skills and hard-won commercial knowledge spend significant portions of their week on tasks that exist not because they add value, but because the systems around them were not designed to eliminate them.
Over time, this workload does not stay contained but expands to fill the available capacity and becomes embedded in how finance teams operate. It feels normal because it has always been this way. But normal is not the same as inevitable and the organisations that recognise that distinction are the ones I see pulling ahead.
The strategic cost of lost time
When asked how they would redeploy their time if administrative workload were reduced by 25 to 50%, the CFOs in our research gave a consistent answer. They did not say they would reduce headcount or cut costs but did say they’d focus on forecasting, analysis and strategic planning. This is business partnering, forward-looking and insight-driven work that finance functions are increasingly being asked to lead but too rarely have the capacity to deliver consistently.
That gap between expectation and execution is where the Manual Tax does its most damage. It is a strategic constraint, quietly limiting what finance functions can contribute at precisely the moment when organisations need that contribution most. However, the capability is there, the training is there but too often what is missing is simply the time.
Where to start
Addressing this does not have to mean waiting for a large-scale transformation programme to run its course. The more immediate question is where the work is actually being created. For many organisations, that points to how payments are executed and recorded day to day. When spend is captured and structured at the point of payment rather than reconstructed downstream through manual effort, the reconciliation burden reduces significantly. Control moves closer to the transaction, visibility improves in real time rather than retrospectively and finance teams recover time without needing to overhaul their entire technology stack to do it.
81% of the finance leaders in our research already see card-led payments as a competitive advantage, citing improvements in control, visibility and efficiency. That is a meaningful signal from a community that is not easily impressed by incremental change.
The conversation about efficiency in finance too often starts with cost reduction. I would argue it should start somewhere else entirely: with an honest assessment of how finance time is being used, where it is being absorbed and what it would take to redirect it. That is where the Manual
Tax can be reduced and that is where the real opportunity for finance functions lies, not in doing more with less, but in doing more of what matters.
About the author
Piero Macari is Vice President of Product Corporate Payments at Corpay, a global S&P 500 corporate payments company. With over 20 years’ experience across blue-chip organisations including Mastercard, GE Capital and leading fintechs, Piero specialises in building technology solutions that enable finance leaders to drive transformation, resilience and growth.
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