The widely held belief goes something like this: business expenses are just another line on the balance sheet. It’s hard to imagine anything more dull, right? But, please, take a closer look, and you might be surprised by what you find.
Just think about them a bit more broadly, and you’ll see they can reveal far more than just how much was spent on that nice lunch in Q2.
The reality is that how your team handles corporate spend is often a reflection of your company’s true culture. The values listed on the website are one thing, and the ones people actually live by are often something completely different.
Do your people hoard receipts like they’re banknotes? How on earth are you still paying for five SaaS tools no one remembers signing up for? And why do client meetings always seem to happen near the beach?
So, here they are — the most common expense personas. You’ll recognise a few – or you might even be one of them – but what we’re really trying to do here is to spot what’s working in your culture, and what’s not.
The Receipt Hoarder
Signature Move: Keeps piling up receipts in a drawer for months. Then hands in a bunch of crumpled bits of paper in a weird bag with a label “May” on it. Has receipts from the last five years, filed by month and never, ever throws anything away.
Culture Clue: You’re still using legacy tools. In practice, this means people are afraid that without some sort of physical proof, they’ll be blamed when something goes missing. So the vibe is more like the 90s, while at the same time you’re branding yourself as an agile, modern company.
Fix: Just make it easy to snap and upload receipts on the go. Automate the matching, and stop month-end from becoming a paper collection project that feels like garbage sorting. The world is digital, stop living in the paper ages.
The Airbnb Maximalist
Signature Move: Books €500/week “client meetings” in beach towns. Also, always books the best (and the most expensive) restaurant in town, because that’s what “building relationships” is all about.
Spotted: Submitting an expense labelled “sales workshop and yachting expedition”.
Culture Clue: You’ve got a high-autonomy culture, and that’s great. But without clear travel policies or approval logic, that autonomy often turns into accounting fog, and your company is haemorrhaging money, with no controls.
Fix: Use card controls and smart limits to give people freedom, or at least clearly defined and reasonable freedom.
The Creative Coder
Signature Move: Expensing “mood lighting” and “ergonomic incense”. There’s that charge for “focus-enhancing turtle” as well.
Spotted: Surrounded by lava lamps, seriously claiming they boost sprint velocity, has a desk chair with a five-speed massage setting and an office fridge filled with exotic ‘activated’ water from a volcanic spring in Peru.
Culture Clue: Of course, it’s important to trust your team and to ensure that they’re happy. It’s important to have some visibility, too. Because without it, finance is left guessing what’s real and what’s, let’s say, something else. Your company definitely has accountability issues.
Fix: Tag spending by team, project, or person. Set boundaries, but don’t kill the vibe.
The SaaS Subscription Phantom
Signature Move: Wants “just to test” seven new tools, signs up for them, and then forgets six exist, loses the login details and claims ignorance when asked.
Spotted: Still getting Slack pings from tools no one’s logged into in months.
Culture Clue: Your team wants to move fast, and it’s good that they want to explore. But there should be someone cleaning up the mess. If that’s not the case, subscription sprawl eats into your budget without anyone noticing.
Fix: Use single-use virtual cards per tool or trial, and set expiry dates to kill zombie spend.
The End-of-Month Panicker
Signature Move: It’s the last day of the month. It’s almost midnight. But someone has just uploaded 19 expenses into your accounting dashboard.
Spotted: Emailing finance from their phone: “Sorry, just saw this was overdue, let me know if you need anything.”
Culture Clue: People delay because the process is painful or unclear, and finance scrambles because too much stuff arrives at once, which means your workflows are reactive, not real-time.
Fix: Automate reminders. Make expense capture simple and mobile-friendly. Good habits follow when the workflow doesn’t suck.
Culture Is in the Cards – Yes, Expense Cards
To sum it up, how your team spends company money says more about your culture than value statements. It reveals how your company actually works.
It’s really not about someone forgetting to upload a receipt or someone else booking a fancy dinner. Expense mess simply points to broken tools, unclear rules, and habits that haven’t been brought into question.
But you don’t need a culture reset, meaning, you don’t have to burn down the house and start anew. You just need a system that makes it easy to do the right things. Essentially, one that helps people stay on track without adding friction, and gives finance visibility without trying to chase everyone down.
Wallester Business was designed with exactly that in mind. Clean workflows, real-time tracking, instant issuing of virtual cards, smart controls — it’s all there in one place, and you can try it now.
