Finance teams today aren’t short on data , but turning that data into meaningful insight remains a real challenge. With growing complexity, faster decision cycles, and increasing pressure to support the business strategically, financial visibility has never been more important.
In this guest Q&A, we speak with Richard Jones, VP of Product at the AccountsIQ Group, about the role product design plays in delivering better financial insight. Richard shares his perspective on why so many organisations struggle with access to better insights, how modern finance tools are helping close the gap, and how innovations like ExpenseIn’s newly launched digital wallets can give businesses greater control and real-time visibility over spend.
Setting the Scene
Q: Richard, as an experienced VP of Product, how do you define financial visibility - and why is it such a priority for finance teams today?
R: For me, financial visibility is being able to trust the numbers quickly enough to act on them.
In practice, it means you can answer basic questions quickly and accurately: What have we spent? What’s still to come? And where is spend drifting away from the plan? If you can’t answer those without pulling spreadsheets together or chasing people for context, you don’t really have visibility. You’ve got data, but not decision-ready information.
It’s become a bigger priority because businesses move faster now. Finance is expected to support decisions in near real time, whether that’s scaling a team, entering a new market, or tightening controls when costs rise. If reporting lags by weeks, you’re effectively steering using last month’s view of the road.
And the risk is that decisions get made on partial information. That can mean missed savings opportunities, avoidable policy breaches, or budget owners getting a surprise at month end. Visibility protects finance teams from that, because it turns spend from something you discover later into something you can manage as it happens.
The Reporting challenge
Q: Many finance teams say they’re ‘data rich but insight poor’. From a product perspective, why does this happen so often?
R: Most of the time, it comes down to fragmentation and friction.
Finance teams might have a finance system, an expense tool, a corporate card provider, maybe an invoice process, and then a pile of spreadsheets holding it all together. Each system has its own data structure, its own rules, and its own gaps, so reporting becomes an exercise in reconciliation rather than insight.
Then there’s the manual element. If people are keying in details from receipts or coding spend after the fact, you get inconsistency. Two people describe the same supplier differently. Someone forgets the project code. Someone uploads the receipt three days later. That’s not a people problem – it’s a product and process problem.
The other issue is that some tools prioritise volume of reporting over usability. They’ll give you every filter under the sun, but not necessarily the clarity that finance teams need: clean categories, consistent coding, and reporting that matches how the organisation actually manages budgets.
The truth is: insight quality is heavily determined at the point of capture. If the data going in is messy, you can’t fix it with a dashboard later.
Product’s role in better insights
Q: How can better product design improve the quality and usefulness of financial insights?
R: Start by designing around how finance teams actually work.
If the product helps employees submit the right detail first time, you reduce rework later. That means structured fields where they matter, simple prompts, and guardrails that nudge good behaviour without slowing people down.
Automation helps too, but only when it’s transparent. Finance teams don’t just want the system to “do things;” they want to understand what happened and why. So, we think a lot about balancing automation with control: reducing repetitive work, while keeping audit trails and clear reporting paths.
And UX plays a bigger role than people realise. If the interface is intuitive, employees comply because it’s easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing. That means fewer exceptions, less chasing, and cleaner data, so reporting becomes faster and more reliable downstream.
Ultimately, the product’s job is to reduce ambiguity. The less time finance spends interpreting messy data, the more time they can spend acting on what it’s telling them.
From expenses to insight
Q: Expense data is often seen as strictly operational. How is this misinterpretation harmful to finance teams?
R: It pushes expenses into the “admin bucket,” when it’s actually one of the clearest views you have of day-to-day cost behaviour.
Expense data shows patterns you can use: travel patterns, supplier usage, project costs creeping up, spend shifting between teams, recurring subscriptions, ad hoc purchases… all of that is valuable for forecasting and budgeting. But if you only look at it after month end, you’re using it as a record, not a management tool.
The bigger issue is alignment. If expense data isn’t structured and coded in a way that maps cleanly to how finance reports (whether that’s by cost centre, project, client, or GL), then it becomes harder to trust, harder to analyse, and harder to use in decision-making.
What we want to enable is a shift from reactive to proactive cost management. Instead of spotting a spike once it’s landed in the ledger, finance can see trends earlier, ask better questions, and support budget owners before spending becomes a problem.
Supporting growth and scale
Q: As organisations scale - especially internationally - what expense management and visibility challenges tend to emerge?
R: Scaling exposes every inconsistency.
Once you’re dealing with multiple entities, different currencies, and different local requirements, it’s much harder to rely on informal processes. What worked for a 50-person business (email approvals, spreadsheet trackers, “we’ll reconcile it later”) starts to crack quickly.
You also get pressure for standardisation. Finance leaders want consistent reporting across regions: the same categories, the same policies, the same approval logic – so they can compare like-for-like and keep control. But the reality is every region has its own quirks, and teams often adopt their own workarounds unless the system is designed to guide them.
From a product perspective, scalability shouldn’t be something you add on later. If you design the foundations well (structured data capture, configurable policies, clear reporting outputs), it becomes much easier to support growth without adding headcount just to keep up with admin.
And this is where real-time visibility matters most. Growth increases spend velocity. Finance needs to see what’s happening now, not when claims eventually land at month end.
Financial visibility starts with the right foundations.
As part of the AccountsIQ Group, ExpenseIn and AccountsIQ work together to give finance teams cleaner data, real-time visibility into spend, and the confidence to make better decisions. Read more.
