Expense and spend management best practices for remote and hybrid teams

Not long ago, the majority of company spending happened in one office with centralized oversight. That world is mostly gone now. Now your engineer in Lisbon is expensing a conference ticket, your sales lead in Austin is buying a client dinner, and your operations manager is renewing a SaaS tool nobody remembers approving, all in the same afternoon — and without any of them setting foot in an office.

Spending has scattered across time zones, currencies, and inboxes, and the old systems built for a single location are starting to show their age. Reimbursement-based expense tracking was built for a world where spending happened occasionally and locally. But ask a distributed team to front their own money and wait weeks to get it back, and you'll wind up with frustrated employees and a finance team chasing receipts every month-end. Worse, you’ll lose visibility into what's happening with company money until it's already spent.

So, what’s the better way? In two words: spend management. For remote and hybrid companies, this process that used to just be an accounting task can be an operational and strategic advantage with a real return on investment. Let’s talk about what that looks like in practice.

First, it helps to separate a few terms that sometimes get used interchangeably but aren't actually the same thing:

• Expense management is what happens after someone spends money. This includes collecting receipts, categorizing transactions, and processing reimbursements.
• Spend management is broader. It covers how spending gets authorized, controlled, and tracked from the moment it happens, not just after the fact.
• Procurement is also related. This is the formal process of sourcing and purchasing goods or services, usually for bigger, planned expenses.
• Corporate cards are one of the tools that makes real-time spend management possible in the first place.

When finance teams shift from using reactive to proactive spend management practices, they're building systems that can guide spending as it occurs, instead of reviewing what already happened. That's the difference between chasing receipts in week three versus knowing exactly what your team spent by the end of the day.

Read Mercury's guide to spend management for CFOs for a deeper dive on how finance leaders are making this transition.

Distributed teams run into a specific set of problems that in-office companies mostly avoid. Here are common issues remote teams often experience. (In the following section, we’ll dive into possible solutions.)

Delayed reimbursements

Imagine an employee books a flight, pays out of pocket, and waits weeks for the money back. That's a rough deal for someone covering a business expense on their own personal credit card, and it can quickly turn into frustration.

Missing receipts

Receipts can get lost in inboxes or forgotten entirely, and finance might end up chasing people down for documentation that could've been automated.

Shadow SaaS subscriptions

Remote teams are especially prone to tool sprawl. Perhaps your design team signs up for a tool, and then your product team signs up for the same category of tool three months later. Nobody notices the overlap until the annual renewals hit.

Multiple currencies

Having a distributed workforce often means working with international vendors and contractors, which means navigating exchange rates, conversion fees, and reconciliation headaches that a single-currency office never has to think about.

Approval bottlenecks

If every purchase needs a founder's sign-off, and that founder is in back-to-back meetings across time zones, purchases will stall. Employees either wait or work around the process, neither of which is great.

Poor visibility and compliance issues

When spending data is scattered across personal cards, expense reports, and disconnected tools, finance will always work from a partial picture, and that makes audits and compliance reviews far harder than they need to be.

Card sharing

A single company card passed around a small team might feel efficient early on, but it makes it nearly impossible to know who spent what, and it's a real security risk.

The best practices for spend management in remote teams all point toward one idea: Build guardrails before spending happens, rather than relying on audits after the fact.

To break that idea down further, here are tips for managing spend for remote teams:

• Issue individual virtual cards. Give every employee their own corporate card, tied to their name and their role, so there's never a question of who made a purchase.
• Set merchant and category controls. Restrict cards to relevant categories, like software or travel, so spending naturally stays on policy.
• Create automated approval workflows. Route purchases above a certain threshold for review automatically, instead of having to manually chase down sign-offs.
• Build clear expense policies. Put spending rules in writing so employees know what's approved without having to ask every time.
• Categorize spending automatically. Set up your expense software to automatically tag transactions as they happen, instead of having to sort them at month-end.
• Monitor subscriptions actively. Regularly review recurring charges to catch duplicate tools before they renew again.
• Review spending throughout the month, not just at close. Doing frequent check-ins can help you catch problems while they're still small.
• Integrate your spend management tools with your accounting software. Having connected systems means that spend data will flow straight into your books, instead of needing to get re-entered by hand.
• Separate business and personal spending. Dedicated business cards keep your books clean, and keep your employees' personal finances out of the equation.
• Give employees autonomy within guardrails. The goal isn't to control every purchase, but to let people move quickly within set limits.

Ready to put these pieces together? Read our guide on how to build a spend management strategy from scratch.

Of all the practices we detailed above, virtual cards probably do the most heavy lifting. So, it’s worth diving into this topic a bit more.

How virtual cards work

A virtual card can be created instantly, the moment someone needs to make a purchase, without waiting for a physical card to ship across a border. You can issue cards by department, so your marketing team's ad spend is separate from your engineering team's tooling budget, for example, or by vendor, so a specific subscription gets its own dedicated card with a spending cap that matches the contract.

Setting spending limits

You’ll set spending limits for each card, so nobody can accidentally (or otherwise) blow past what's approved. If something looks off, you can freeze a card in seconds, rather than having to call a bank. And because every transaction is tied to a specific card and person, you’ll get a clean audit trail without any extra work.

Onboarding and offboarding

That same instant-issuance model makes onboarding and offboarding way easier. A new remote hire can have a working card before their first day even starts. And when someone leaves, freezing their card takes seconds, instead of the multi-step process of canceling and reissuing physical ones.

For a deeper look at how to manage role-based spending, read Mercury's guide to employee spending controls.

When you're evaluating expense management solutions for remote teams, assess whether each of the platforms you’re considering meet these core criteria:

• Virtual cards: Are virtual cards on option? If so, will you have the ability to issue, limit, and freeze cards on demand?
• Approval automation: Can you set up automations that will route exceptions to the right person, without slowing down routine purchases?
• Accounting integrations: What integrations are available? Make sure spend data will be able to flow directly into your books.
• Mobile receipt capture: Is this feature available? To streamline your processes, you’ll want documentation that can happen in the moment, not days later.
• Reimbursement workflows: How does the software help you manage any out-of-pocket expenses that still come up?
• International support: What levels of support does the platform offer for teams spending across currencies and borders?
• Real-time visibility: Will you get real-time visibility into spending as it happens (and not weeks later)? What sort of tools and dashboards help you track spend?
• Role-based permissions: Make sure you’ll be able to customize permissions based on roles, so access and limits match each person's job.

Weigh the answers against how your team spends today and where it's headed as your business grows, rather than trying to find an option with every possible feature.

Mercury's breakdown of the best expense management software for startups and small businesses is a useful reference if you want to see how these criteria play out across different tools.

Good spend management gives your team the freedom to move quickly while keeping your finances clear and under control. As your team expands, the right systems provide thoughtful guardrails that reduce manual oversight, so your finance team spends less time chasing receipts and more time helping the business grow. That starts with spend visibility. If you don't know where your money is going as it's spent, everything downstream gets harder.

Mercury brings banking, virtual cards, approvals, and real-time visibility into one connected system, so spend management for remote businesses doesn't require stitching together five different tools. If your team is ready to move past spreadsheets and reimbursement backlogs, explore Mercury's spend management platform and see what it looks like to give your team spending power, without losing sight of where it's going.