The spend problem that doesn’t show up until it’s too late
Nick Lavine, Izzy Rosenberg, and Rachel Harris unpack why growing businesses lose visibility over spend, and what finance teams can do before the damage compounds.
Based on a To the Max webinar featuring Nick Lavine (Chartered Accountant and Fintech Consultant), Izzy Rosenberg (Founder, Prosperify), and Rachel Harris (Founder, Strivex Accountants)
Most businesses don’t lose control of their spend in one dramatic moment. There’s no single invoice that tips the scales. Instead, it happens gradually. An email approval here, a Slack message there, a recurring charge nobody reviewed because it was “only” a few hundred dollars a month.
By the time it shows up in the numbers, the damage has been compounding for months.
In a recent To the Max webinar, Nick Lavine, chartered accountant and fintech consultant, sat down with Izzy Rosenberg, founder of Prosperify, and Rachel Harris, founder of Strivex Accountants, to explore why growing businesses quietly lose grip on their spend, and what finance teams can do before the problem becomes a crisis.
• 29,000 UK businesses went insolvent in 2025. With rising costs and tighter funding, knowing where your cash goes is no longer optional.
• If someone has to ask “who approves this?” more than once, the process is broken. Audit how decisions actually get made, not just the numbers that come out the other side.
• Email approvals are still manual approvals. So are Slack sign-offs and spreadsheet tracking. None of them scale, and all of them create risk.
• Fraud rarely starts with intent. It starts with a workaround. An informal approval becomes normal, then becomes a vulnerability nobody notices.
• Map your processes before you buy software. Technology on top of a broken workflow gives you two problems instead of one.
The environment has changed. The stakes are higher.
Nick opened by setting the scene. In 2025, there were just under 29,000 insolvencies in the UK. Payroll costs, employer NICs, energy bills, and business rates are all climbing. At the same time, funding is harder to come by. UK VC deal volume dropped 19% year-on-year, meaning businesses can no longer count on the next round to paper over operational gaps.
The era of growth at all costs is over. What matters now is runway, profitability, and sustainability. And that starts with knowing exactly where your cash is going.
Just under 29,000 businesses became insolvent in the UK in 2025. With rising costs and tighter funding, spend visibility has moved from a nice-to-have to a survival skill.
Fix the process before you buy the tool
One of the strongest themes of the session was a point Izzy made early on: “It’s like building a house. You wouldn’t start without an architect.”
If you implement technology on top of broken processes, you end up with two problems instead of one. The original issue, and the tools you’ve bolted on to manage it. The fix is to map and understand your workflows first, then bring in software to support them.
Rachel reinforced this from a different angle. She sees tech implementations fail when the underlying processes are weak, the team hasn’t bought in, or the culture resists change. Her advice: get alignment first, map the workflow second, train properly third. The technology comes last.
Learn to spot a broken process before it costs you
Rachel made one of the sharpest observations of the session. Most businesses look at variance reports and financial statements when something feels off. Rachel thinks that’s the wrong place to start.
“Look at how people actually behave,” she said. “Who’s approving what, and how? That tells you more than any report.”
What does that look like in practice? Look for founder bottlenecks. Look for repeated approvals via WhatsApp or Slack. Look for confusion around who approves what. If someone has to ask that question more than once, you have a process gap.
That shift in focus makes a real difference. Instead of chasing variance reports after the fact, you’re watching how decisions get made in real time. And that’s where the real leaks hide.
Manual doesn’t just mean paper
Izzy pushed back on a common assumption: that “manual” processes only refer to pen-and-paper workflows.
In reality, email approvals are manual. Slack sign-offs are manual. Spreadsheet tracking is manual. Anything requiring unnecessary human intervention to move a transaction forward counts. You need human oversight, absolutely. But you don’t need over-engineered processes that depend on someone remembering to check their inbox.
The downsides compound quickly. Poor visibility, slow access to data, and a lack of scalability. Having the data somewhere in a spreadsheet or email thread doesn’t help if it takes hours to find and verify. Manual processes become expensive in both time and resources, and they tend to break precisely when the business can least afford it: during growth.
Fraud rarely starts with intent
One of the most sobering moments in the session came when Rachel described how fraud actually begins inside growing businesses.
“Fraud rarely starts as fraud,” she said. “It starts as a workaround.”
An approval via WhatsApp becomes normal. An email sign-off becomes the standard process. Over time, those workarounds create real vulnerabilities: no audit trail, the same person raising and approving spend, decisions made under pressure without review. Nobody set out to create a fraud risk. But weak systems leave the door open.
This is where structured approval workflows make a measurable difference. Tools like ApprovalMax enforce segregation of duties automatically, so one person can’t raise, approve, and pay a transaction without oversight. The process doesn’t depend on someone remembering the rules. The rules are built into the system.
All three panelists agreed: most growing businesses don’t have a spending problem. They have a visibility problem. They’re spending without seeing where the money goes until weeks later. Visibility gives decision confidence. Without it, controls just add friction.
You can’t control what you can’t see
Nick brought the conversation back to the macro picture: costs are rising faster than revenue for many businesses, and funding is harder to access. In that environment, you can’t afford to wait for month-end to discover a problem.
Izzy expanded on this point. Visibility helps businesses spot risks early, whether that’s a margin drop, an unexpected cost increase, or a recurring charge that nobody authorized. Instead of reacting after the quarter closes, finance teams can act while there’s still time to course-correct.
Rachel added a practical dimension. Visibility doesn’t just help with day-to-day operations. It transforms audits. When the story already exists in the system, there’s less back-and-forth, faster responses, and cleaner trails. Audits go smoother when you’re not reconstructing history from scattered emails and spreadsheets.
Where to start if this sounds familiar
The panelists closed with practical advice for finance teams recognizing these patterns in their own organizations:
- Watch how approvals actually happen. Sit with your team for a week and track whether invoices follow the official process or end up in email threads and Slack DMs. The gap will tell you everything.
- Map your processes before buying software. Technology amplifies what’s already there. If the process is broken, the tool will just make that visible faster.
- Define ownership clearly. If more than one person can say “I thought someone else approved that,” your process has a gap.
- Keep approval rules simple. Use thresholds and supplier-based logic. Trying to cover every possible scenario upfront will slow your team down and delay the rollout.
- Design your processes to scale. Rachel’s advice was pointed: many businesses redesign their systems every year because they only planned for the next step. Think two or three steps ahead.
Izzy’s parting thought stayed with the room: smaller businesses can be the most vulnerable, because they have the least reserves to absorb a loss. Early visibility is essential, especially when there’s no margin for error.
This article is based on a To the Max webinar featuring Nick Lavine (Chartered Accountant and Fintech Consultant), Izzy Rosenberg (Founder, Prosperify), and Rachel Harris (Founder, Strivex Accountants). Watch the full recording here.
