Who pays for what in a small team.
Somewhere between the third and the fifteenth person, paying for things stops being obvious. Nobody wants to own it and everybody has an opinion about receipts. This is the arrangement that survives.
At three people, paying for things is not a system. Someone buys the domain, someone else expenses lunch, and the founder settles it from the business account when they remember.
At fifteen it is a job, and it is nobody's job. That gap is where teams lose track of a surprising amount of money, and where good people end up 400 out of pocket for six weeks because a receipt went to the wrong inbox.
What follows is the arrangement that tends to survive, in the order you should set it up.
Decide the three routes, then close the fourth
Money leaves a small company in three legitimate ways.
- A company card. The company pays directly. No reimbursement, no chasing.
- A personal card, reimbursed. The person pays, the company pays them back.
- An invoice to the company. The supplier bills you and you pay it on terms.
The fourth way is the problem: someone pays for something on a personal card and never claims it, or claims it in March for something in November. That is not generosity, it is an unrecorded liability, and it distorts every number you look at until it lands.
So the first rule is not about limits. It is that everything gets recorded on the day it happens, including the things people are relaxed about. A 12 charge that nobody claimed is a small loss to that person and a small lie in your accounts.
Who is allowed to spend, and up to what
Write three numbers down. The exact values matter less than having them.
- Below 100: anyone, no approval. Their own judgement, recorded after the fact. If you cannot trust a colleague with 100, the problem is not the expenses policy.
- 100 to 1,000: one yes, from someone who is not the person spending. Before the money leaves, not after.
- Above 1,000, or anything recurring: the person who owns the budget. Recurring is the important half of that sentence. A 90 a month tool is a 1,080 a year commitment, and it will be approved by nobody because it looks like 90.
The rule that keeps it honest is that nobody approves their own spend, at any amount. Not because a founder will defraud their own company, but because the moment there is one exception, the policy is advisory, and advisory policies are the ones people stop reading.
The category nobody owns: subscriptions
Every small team has software it is paying for and not using. It accumulates in a specific way: someone trials a tool on a personal card, expenses it, leaves, and the charge keeps going out on a card that is still active.
Two things fix most of it.
Every recurring charge has a named owner. Not a team, a person. When they leave, their list gets reassigned in the offboarding checklist, next to the laptop.
One review a quarter, against the actual charges. Not against a list of tools somebody wrote down. Against the card statement, which is the only document that knows the truth.
An hour a quarter regularly finds more money than a week of negotiating a supplier down.
Reimbursements are a morale problem, not an accounting one
If a colleague pays 380 for a flight and gets it back seven weeks later, they will not complain, they will simply stop paying for things. Then the person who is comfortable being out of pocket, usually whoever is most senior or best paid, absorbs it, and your expense data quietly becomes wrong.
Set one rule and keep it: claims submitted by a date are paid on a fixed day, every month. A predictable slow payout is better than an unpredictable fast one. People can plan around the fifth of the month. They cannot plan around "when someone gets to it".
If somebody has to front an unusual amount, several hundred or more, pay it before the cycle or pay it in advance. A company card for the people who travel removes the problem entirely, and the reason to hand out fewer cards is almost never as good as it sounds.
Receipts: capture, not filing
The receipt problem is not filing. It is timing. A receipt captured at the till takes four seconds. The same receipt on the twenty eighth of the month takes fifteen minutes of searching an inbox, and about one in five is never found.
So the policy is one line: capture it when it happens, wherever the team already is. If that is a chat app, it should be a chat app. Any workflow that requires opening a separate tool at the end of the month is a workflow that produces a scramble at the end of the month.
What you need on the record is small: what it was, who bought it, which budget it belongs against, and the image. Everything else can be worked out later.
What to do at month end
Four checks, twenty minutes.
- Nothing unclaimed. Ask once, in public. Somebody always has one.
- Every charge has an owner and a category. An uncategorised charge in month one is a mystery by month four.
- Recurring charges against the owner list. Anything on the statement that is not on the list is a question.
- What the team actually cost. Not just what was approved. The two differ, and the difference is the number worth watching.
That is the whole ritual. Teams that do it stay in control at fifty people. Teams that do not are reconstructing a year at the point their accountant asks.
Where the tooling comes in
None of the above needs software until the recording is the bottleneck, which is usually somewhere between eight and fifteen people. What you want then is narrow: spending lands in one ledger as it happens, with the person and the budget attached, and money that needs a second pair of eyes cannot leave without them.
That is the shape of payouts and approvals in Orla: a payment run that somebody prepares and somebody else releases, with the rule enforced rather than remembered. Trust and control covers the other half, which is who can see and do what, because the answer for a bookkeeper, a co-founder and a contractor should not be the same answer. If the team is the whole point rather than a side of a personal account, the business version is the one to read.
The short version
Three routes for money leaving. Three approval thresholds, with nobody approving their own. A named owner for every recurring charge. A fixed payout day for reimbursements. Capture receipts where people already are.
Six sentences, and it will hold to about fifty people. What it costs is one uncomfortable conversation early, which is considerably cheaper than the one where somebody has been out of pocket since spring and stopped mentioning it.