If your finance team is spending hours sorting receipts, reviewing manual entries, or trying to make sense of inconsistent forms, your expense management process probably isn’t serving you anymore. Manual reconciliation increases the risk of mistakes, creates bottlenecks, and takes time away from higher-value work.
Here are five signs that it’s time to move on from outdated processes, and how Sparkrock can help!
Some organizations still rely on employees printing out credit card statements, stapling receipts, and mailing them to finance. Others collect them in envelopes or internal mail drops. Either way, you’re left with a pile of paperwork to sort through.
Once you’ve got that pile? It’s easy for those crumpled receipts to get lost, delayed, or buried, and it forces your team to spend more time organizing paperwork than processing it.
One of our customers described having to highlight individual credit card holders’ names on bank statements, photocopy each one, and then send them to employees for coding. That process alone used to take hours.
What Sparkrock does differently:
Corporate credit card transactions are imported directly into the system through the purchasing card journal. Once imported, Sparkrock pushes those transactions out to employees in mySparkrock—our mobile platform—where they can log in, attach receipts, and code each entry, with no printing or mailing required.
If you're reviewing receipts stapled to printed spreadsheets or handwritten forms, you’re working with a process that’s hard to track and easy to get wrong.
Paper submissions vary in quality. Some are missing details. Others are hard to read. And when there’s no consistent format, your finance team ends up re-checking every line or re-entering the information entirely. That takes time and increases the risk of errors.
We’ve heard from organizations where employees dropped off receipts attached to mileage logs or scribbled notes with no clear coding. In some cases, there wasn’t even a name on the form. Finance teams were left guessing who the claim belonged to and what it was for.
What Sparkrock does differently:
Employees enter expenses in mySparkrock using structured forms with predefined types and dropdowns. Required fields help prevent missing information. Receipts are uploaded directly into the system. Account sets guide the coding process so even users with no finance background can submit accurate claims with less follow-up.
If any of this blog sounds familiar, watch the webinar that inspired this post for a live demo of Sparkrock’s expense management tools, including credit card reconciliation and employee expense claims. Watch the webinar →
We love Excel. It’s a powerful tool for analysis and reporting. But when you’re using it to manually track and match credit card transactions, it quickly becomes more of a burden than a benefit.
Many teams download statements, compare them with employee-submitted spreadsheets, manually check each transaction, and then verify receipts. That’s a lot of copying, pasting, flipping between tabs, and hoping nothing gets missed. This kind of manual process can lead to mismatched data, missing entries, and hours of wasted time.
What Sparkrock does differently:
Credit card transactions are imported into Sparkrock and pushed directly to the appropriate employee in mySparkrock. They can link each transaction with a receipt and complete the coding in one place. You can even allow employees to upload receipts ahead of time, then reconcile when the statement comes in.
Finance staff can review, approve, and post claims from a single screen with full visibility. No spreadsheet comparisons, no folders to search, and no cross-checking by hand.
Let’s be honest. Even people who understand finance make coding mistakes. Members of our team have accidentally picked the wrong GL account when submitting an expense before. It happens.
But when employees don’t know the chart of accounts or how their entry affects budgets and reporting, those mistakes become much more frequent. And someone else always ends up fixing it.
One finance lead told us her team regularly received travel expenses coded to general admin instead of the correct program or project. Sorting those out took hours of review and rework.
What Sparkrock does differently:
In mySparkrock, employees choose from preconfigured expense types. Each one is tied to the correct GL account behind the scenes. Account sets then walk users through selecting the right department, region, or funding source.
There are also validation checks and policy reminders built in, so employees know if something’s missing before they submit.
For finance teams, it means fewer surprises and cleaner data. Managers can spot trends, catch issues early, and spend less time correcting the same problems over and over.
When your AP team is spending entire days reconciling credit card expenses and reimbursable claims, it’s hard to focus on anything else. Tracking down missing receipts, fixing coding issues, and double-checking totals leaves little time for bigger priorities like forecasting, analysis, or improving processes.
One organization told us they kept a physical box of expense envelopes under a desk. If the receipt wasn’t in the box, it didn’t get processed.
Manual reconciliation slows your team down and forces them to operate reactively. Too much time is spent correcting issues that could have been avoided in the first place.
What Sparkrock does differently:
Sparkrock helps your team stay ahead by centralizing and simplifying the entire process:
This reduces rework, prevents bottlenecks, and frees up time across the team.
Your finance team should be guiding decisions, not chasing paperwork.
Manual processes may have worked in the past, but they don’t scale. And they’re not sustainable for a team trying to manage growing responsibilities with limited time and resources.
The good news? You don’t have to build something new from scratch. Sparkrock is already helping organizations across the nonprofit, education, and public sectors simplify expense claims, credit card reconciliation, and broader ERP financial system workflows.
We combine the reliability of cloud enterprise resource planning with tools designed for the real-world challenges of finance teams like yours.
If your team is spending more time managing receipts than managing spend, it’s time to take a look at what Sparkrock can do.
Set up a demo to see how our expense management system works and how it can make life easier for your team.