Most of the SMB clients I’ve worked with over the years have a version of the same blind spot. Their business has grown, their teams are on the road more, and the way they’re managing travel expense looks almost exactly the way it did when they had ten employees instead of thirty.
Nobody set out to build a broken system. The informal workflow that made sense when everyone knew everyone just never got updated. A booking here, a reimbursement request there, a spreadsheet somewhere in between. It functions until it doesn’t, and by the time it stops functioning, the problem has usually been running longer than anyone realized.
Early in my career, I took on a fractional controller engagement with a Microsoft training company. Their trainers were constantly on the road and each had a company credit card. Monthly invoices came in for reimbursement with no original receipts required, no approval chain, and nobody reviewing the vendor list. The first time I looked at that setup I knew it wasn’t a system. It was a set of assumptions dressed up as a process.
I put a receipt requirement in place and flagged the gap. Hours before I left on maternity leave, someone on the internal team reached out to me about following the thread I’d identified. The inventory didn’t match the purchases; trainers had been submitting receipts for training books month after month, substantial amounts, but the books didn’t exist anywhere in the company. When they traced the vendor it wasn’t a bookstore. It was strip clubs. Hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years, hiding inside a workflow where no single person ever had to see the complete picture.
That’s an extreme outcome. But the structural condition that made it possible is not extreme at all. When booking, payment, and reconciliation happen in separate places with no single point of oversight connecting them, problems don’t have to be sophisticated to survive. They just have to be patient.
The Gap Between Policy and Workflow
The advisory conversation that’s worth having is not complicated, but most firms aren’t having it proactively. More than one-third of businesses identify booking outside required channels as their top compliance issue, and BILL’s platform data shows average annual SMB travel spend reached $60,700 per business in 2025, up 48% from 2022. That’s a category growing significantly, and the controls around it for most SMB clients have not kept pace.
The conversation starts with a few honest questions about how the workflow actually functions. Who approves travel spend before it happens, or does approval only come after the money is already spent? How does a receipt move from an employee’s phone into the general ledger, and how many manual steps does that require? When was the T&E policy last reviewed, and does it actually reflect how the team travels today?
These aren’t adversarial questions. They’re design questions. The answers tell you quickly whether a client has a working system or a working assumption, and that distinction matters more as their travel volume grows.
The Advisor’s Opportunity
The reason this category has been so difficult to manage for growing businesses is that the pieces of the workflow have historically lived in separate places. A booking tool disconnected from the accounting system, a company card reconciled apart from reimbursement requests, a finance team manually connecting data every month that should already be connected.
BILL Travel addresses exactly that gap, built directly into BILL Spend & Expense so that booking, card controls, budgets, and reconciliation all move through the same workflow. Policy controls apply at the point of booking before money moves, and finance teams have visibility into what’s being spent on the road rather than piecing it together weeks later.
For the accounting advisor, that kind of integration changes the quality of the conversation you can have with a client. When the data flows cleanly from booking through reconciliation, you spend less time asking clients to locate things and more time on what the numbers actually mean for their business.
The firms that will earn the deepest client relationships over the next several years are the ones bringing these conversations to clients before something goes wrong. Your clients are not going to walk in and tell you their travel expense workflow has a structural problem. They don’t know it does. That’s the advisor’s job to see, and to say something about it while there’s still time to build the right structure around it.
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Tags: expense manamgement, expenses, receipts, Small Business, SMBs, travel
