Managing expenses in higher education can be complex. Faculty travel to conferences, researchers incur field expenses, athletics teams travel, study-abroad programs operate internationally, and departments buy supplies and services every day. That decentralization helps institutions operate, but it can also create inconsistent documentation, slow approvals, limited visibility, and budget surprises.
And, the challenge is getting bigger and more complex. The Global Business Travel Association’s 2026 Business Travel Index projects education business-travel spending to grow at a 6.3% compound annual growth rate through 2030, placing education among the faster-growing sectors in its forecast.
So, how should higher education define business expense management? It is the combination of policies, systems, workflows, and controls used to capture, approve, reimburse, categorize, and report institutional business expenses. For procurement and finance leaders, the goal is greater control over decentralized spend.
Expense management covers the full lifecycle of business expenses, from policy and authorization through payment, documentation, approval, accounting, and reporting. Effective business expense management gives institutions a consistent framework for handling purchases that may occur outside traditional procurement workflows.
While procurement typically focuses on sourcing, contracts, purchase orders, and supplier relationships before a purchase occurs, expense management governs transactions that are made by employees or departments and then documented, approved, reconciled, or reimbursed afterward.
Higher education adds complexity because those transactions may originate across multiple schools, campuses, research programs, auxiliary operations, and funding sources. A single institution may need to apply different rules to unrestricted operating funds, grants, donor-supported programs, athletics, and international activities.
Applying expense management best practices means designing a standardized process before an employee spends money and continuing through reconciliation and reporting.
Provide clear definitions for:
Policies should also reflect grant, donor, departmental, and institutional requirements.
Travel, project, or departmental spending may require approval before a commitment is made. Preapproval helps prevent policy problems instead of forcing finance teams to correct them after the fact.
The employee may use personal funds when reimbursement is appropriate or an institution-issued payment method such as a corporate card when that better fits the transaction and policy.
Define what documentation is required for employee expense management, such as receipts, business purpose, date, supplier, expense category, funding source, attendees, and other supporting information. Mobile expense management can be a big help here, allowing employees to capture digital images of required documents immediately.
A digital workflow can route transactions based on department, amount, expense category, project, or funding source. Exceptions can be flagged when receipts are missing or transactions exceed established thresholds.
Approved expenses are reimbursed where necessary, coded to the proper accounts, reflected in budgets, and retained for reporting and audit purposes.
Manual forms, emailed spreadsheets, paper receipts, and approval chains create friction for everyone involved. Employees may wait weeks to submit expenses, managers may have little visibility into what is pending, and finance teams may need to re-enter information into multiple systems.
68% of employees who file expense reports said they had lost receipts before submitting them. Errors are also common. The American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) reports that about 8% of all expense reports are missing documentation or have mistakes that create follow-up work.
The result is not only slower reimbursement. It can also mean inconsistent categorization, delayed budget updates, and less reliable spend data. When each department develops its own informal process, institutions lose the ability to manage expenses consistently across campus.
The timing of expense data matters as well. If a department’s transactions are not visible until weeks after travel or purchasing occurs, budget owners may make new commitments based on an incomplete picture. Faster capture gives finance teams a more current view of obligations and gives department leaders more opportunity to adjust before a budget problem grows.
This part of the process focuses specifically on faculty and staff spending. Typical use cases include conferences, admissions recruiting, athletics travel, research activities, study-abroad supervision, and professional development.
Cumbersome processes can undermine compliance. When policies are difficult to interpret or reporting requires repeated data entry, employees may delay submissions or make avoidable mistakes. It’s an issue for your employees. One American Express survey found that rather than have to deal with cumbersome expense reports, they would rather have a performance review, experience flight delays, or have to spend a full day in virtual meetings.
Nearly a quarter of those responding in a SAP Concur survey said they’d rather have a cavity filled, and it gets worse. A Bayan study reported that a third would rather renew their driver’s license at the DMV or even eat a worm.
A better process helps your employees and simplifies expense management for everyone, reducing unnecessary out-of-pocket spending, makes policies easy to find, simplifies documentation, and gives employees visibility into reimbursement status. The easier the process is to follow, the more likely it is that the institution receives complete and accurate information the first time.
Expense management software centralizes the capture and processing of business expenses. Typical capabilities include receipt capture, automated data extraction, expense categorization, policy checks, approval routing, accounting-code assignment, ERP integration, and reporting.
An effective platform standardizes the process across departments while still accommodating differences in funding sources, travel policies, or approval requirements.
That simplification can have strategic value. EDUCAUSE identified administrative simplification as its #2 issue facing higher education leadership, noting that legacy and multi-system workflows increase administrative overhead, slow processing, and erode trust among faculty and staff.
Mobile tools allow employees and approvers to capture, submit, approve, and monitor expenses from a phone or tablet. An employee can photograph a receipt as soon as a purchase occurs, add the business purpose while the details are fresh, and submit the expense without waiting until returning to campus. Managers can approve transactions while traveling, and systems can alert users when required documentation is missing.
These capabilities are especially useful for faculty travel, athletics, study abroad, field research, and recruiting. They can also matter for sponsored research, where documentation quality directly affects compliance and cost recovery.
Institution-issued payment methods can complement an expense-management program by reducing the need for employees to finance institutional purchases personally. When institution-issued card transactions flow directly into an expense system, finance teams can gain faster visibility and simplify reconciliation.
Potential advantages include:
Universities facing funding pressure, policy changes, and limits on tuition growth are increasingly looking beyond simple cost-cutting toward structural expense reform. Deloitte’s 2026 Higher Education Trends analysis highlights the growing need for institutions to scrutinize operating models, funding, and resource allocation more closely, in both spend management and expense management.
Here’s how spend management vs expense management compare.
Area | Expense Management | Spend Management |
Primary focus | Employee and business expenses | Broader organizational spend |
Typical activities | Travel, reimbursements, card expenses | Sourcing, procurement, contracts, purchasing, expenses |
Main users | Employees, managers, finance | Procurement, finance, departments |
Timing | Often during or after purchase | Before, during, and after purchase |
Goal | Control and process expenses | Optimize total organizational spend |
Expense management is one part of a broader spend-management strategy. Its data can help procurement identify repeated off-contract buying, categories that may need sourcing, supplier-consolidation opportunities, and department-level purchasing patterns.
Technology works best when institutions pair it with clear governance. Several practical measures can improve both control and user experience.
Use common definitions, documentation rules, spending thresholds, and approval standards wherever possible. Limit department-specific exceptions to situations where they are genuinely necessary.
Encourage employees to document transactions immediately rather than reconstructing trips or purchases at month-end. Faster capture reduces lost receipts and missing details.
Use rules to route ordinary transactions automatically and reserve manual attention for exceptions, missing documentation, or unusual spending.
Connections between expense and financial systems reduce duplicate entry and improve the timeliness of accounting and budget information.
Analyze recurring employee purchases to find categories that may be better served through contracts, catalogs, or preferred suppliers.
Useful metrics include:
Expense data can reveal decentralized activity that traditional procurement data may not capture completely. That makes business expense management valuable not only for reimbursement but also for spend visibility.
Procurement and finance teams can use the data to:
Over time, these insights can reveal opportunities to move recurring purchases into negotiated or contracted channels. The result is a more complete picture of institutional spending, including both centrally sourced purchases and smaller transactions occurring throughout campus.
Institutions should evaluate the complete workflow from purchase through approval, reimbursement, accounting, and reporting, including:
The specific technology matters, but process fit matters more. Institutions should determine whether the solution can support their policies, funding structures, approval hierarchies, and reporting requirements without creating unnecessary complexity.
Implementation should also account for adoption. A sophisticated platform won’t deliver full value if faculty and staff find it difficult to use or departments continue relying on spreadsheets and email. Procurement and finance leaders should evaluate training requirements, accessibility, administrator workload, and the effort required to maintain policy rules over time.
The most important improvements begin before software implementation. Technology cannot fix unclear policies, duplicate approvals, or poorly defined responsibilities.
Before automating employee expense management, map the existing process:
Then simplify.
Remove unnecessary steps, standardize requirements, and automate only after the institution understands the workflow it wants to preserve.
What is expense management in higher education?
For a college or university, expense management is the coordinated use of policies, technology, approvals, reimbursement procedures, reconciliation, and reporting to control institutional business expenses. The objective is to give employees a workable process while giving procurement and finance teams accurate, timely spend information.
What is the difference between spend management and expense management?
The simplest way to understand spend management vs expense management is scope. Expense management focuses primarily on employee and business expenses, while spend management encompasses a wider range of organizational activity, including sourcing, contracts, purchasing, supplier management, and expenses.
Can employees submit expenses from a phone?
Modern mobile expense management platforms allow employees to photograph receipts, enter business purposes, submit expenses, monitor status, and respond to missing-documentation requests from a mobile device.
How do corporate cards work with expense management software?
Transactions from a corporate card can feed directly into expense software, where they may be matched with receipts, categorized, coded, and routed for approval. These cards can reduce reimbursement volume and manual entry while preserving documentation and policy requirements.
E&I Cooperative Services, the only member-owned, nonprofit sourcing cooperative exclusively focused on education, offers a competitively solicited contract with Corpay, a fully integrated AP and expense management solution. Explore E&I’s Corpay contract to see how the platform can support expense control, employee spending, payment workflows, and financial visibility without conducting a separate sourcing process.