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As businesses grow, company and employee spending can become increasingly complex to manage and affect agility and decision-making.

The latest Amex Trendex: Expense Management Edition uncovered a significant obstacle for mid-sized businesses' expense management processes and their ambitions: 88% of businesses surveyed agree that their company's future growth may depend on getting a better handle on employee spending.

• Why it's important: Expense management is no longer just a back-office, siloed task. Manual expense management processes have the potential to slow business decisions, increase compliance risk and put pressure on already stretched finance teams.

What the Amex Trendex found: Many companies are rethinking how expense management fits into their broader financial operations. The Trendex identified three areas that surveyed businesses say could help simplify overly complex processes to leave room to manage growth more effectively:

Simplifying Systems

As spending increases, companies may rely on multiple systems to see where money is going. The vast majority of businesses surveyed use multiple tools to manage their company and employee expenses, with 66% using at least three.

• However, two-thirds (67%) of businesses surveyed say that it is challenging to maintain control over spending across multiple tools.
• To keep up, companies are reducing reliance on disparate financial tools and instead looking for a single platform to automate their processes, with nine-in-ten (92%) of respondents saying that their business is making efforts to consolidate tools this year.

Dynamic Policies

Businesses need flexible controls and policies that can adapt as their business grows and spending needs change.

• By mid-April, nearly half of businesses surveyed (41%) have already had to adjust their companies expense policies in 2026.
• A majority (88%) of businesses surveyed agree that they need an expense management tool that can evolve as their business dynamics change.

AI-Powered Automation and Spend Visibility

More than six-in-ten (64%) businesses surveyed say their expense management processes rely too heavily on manual work, while 69% say reconciling expenses has been the biggest drain on their team's time this year.

• Businesses that use AI were twice as likely to say that it is very easy to see exactly where their company is spending compared to companies that don't (45% vs. 23%).

What Amex is saying: "Relying on manual, disconnected processes to track spending can limit a growing business' agility and have leaders reacting to spend instead of directing it," said Eva Reda, executive vice president and general manager of Global Commercial Services Products at American Express.

• "Finance leaders need integrated tools that can be easily reconfigured as company policies change and provide near-instant visibility into corporate spending. Consolidating platforms can allow teams to move beyond tracking expenses and focus on driving strategic growth."

Looking ahead: Connected expense management tools and AI-powered solutions can help businesses simplify processes, improve oversight and create more flexibility as their needs evolve.

• Maintaining oversight of company-wide spending is essential for driving growth, and the next phase of business success will depend on how quickly businesses can adapt the right solutions, so they use their financial data to move with confidence.

Read more from the Amex Trendex: Expense Management Edition.

The Amex Trendex: Expense Management Edition is a survey tracking mid-sized businesses' sentiment about expense management and corporate spend.

Methodology: The Amex Trendex: Expense Management Edition poll was commissioned by American Express and conducted by Morning Consult between April 13 - 17, 2026 among a sample of 513 Financial Decision Makers at companies with $4M - $100M in company revenue. The interviews were conducted online and the data was weighted to partials to approximate a target sample of FDMs based on business size, industry and decision-making role. Results from the full survey have a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

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