Piero Macari, VP of product corporate payments at Corpay, discusses the challenges faced by construction finance teams surrounding structural payment
Construction and engineering businesses face a structural payment challenge. Supplier payments are made across multiple project sites, purchases are initiated by site managers and project teams and reconciliation happens long after the transaction has taken place. The result is a finance function that spends significant time reconstructing spend rather than actually managing it.
Research conducted among 300 UK CFOs from organisations with an annual turnover above £20m has put a number on what many in construction finance already know. 86% of finance teams spend six or more hours per person, per week on administration across expenses, invoices and supplier payments. That is close to a full working day, every week, for every member of the team. Nearly 30% are spending more than 11 hours. I call this the Manual Tax – it does not appear on any budget or project cost plan, but it is being paid every week, and unlike most taxes, it compounds.
Why the moment matters
The timing matters more than ever. Deloitte’s April 2026 UK CFO Survey confirms that cost discipline, liquidity and operational efficiency are firmly back at the top of the agenda for finance leaders, shaped by a more volatile backdrop of geopolitical risk and economic uncertainty. Most of that scrutiny lands on visible costs: headcount, vendor contracts, capital expenditure. However, the Manual Tax is not visible; it does not show up on a dashboard or trigger an alert, and that is precisely what makes it significant and what makes it so consistently overlooked.
Our research shows that 83% of finance leaders say their spend processes are still more manual than they should be, while 85% believe current payment processes increase the risk of error, fraud or off-policy spend. These concerns describe the operational reality for the majority of UK finance functions right now, across sectors and organisation sizes.
Where the work comes from
The source of the problem is structural, and it is worth being specific about where it sits. In most organisations, payment processes remain disconnected from data capture and control systems. Spend is authorised in one place, recorded in another and reconciled somewhere else entirely. Each handoff in that chain creates friction: approvals to chase, data to re-enter, exceptions to investigate, discrepancies to resolve. Finance professionals with strong analytical skills and hard-won commercial knowledge spend significant portions of their week on tasks that exist not because they add value, but because the systems around them were not designed to eliminate them.
Over time, this workload does not remain contained; it expands to fill available capacity and becomes embedded in how finance teams operate. It feels normal because it has always been this way. But normal is not the same as inevitable, and the organisations that recognise that distinction are the ones I see pulling ahead.
The strategic cost of lost time
When asked how they would redeploy their time if administrative workload were reduced by 25 to 50%, the CFOs in our research gave a consistent answer. They did not say they would reduce headcount or cut costs, but did say they would focus on forecasting, analysis and strategic planning. This is business partnering, forward-looking and insight-driven work that finance functions are increasingly being asked to lead but too rarely have the capacity to deliver consistently.
That gap between expectation and execution is where the Manual Tax does its most damage. It is a strategic constraint, quietly limiting what finance functions can contribute precisely when organisations need that contribution most. However, the capability and the training are there, but too often what is missing is simply the time.
Where construction businesses can start
For construction and engineering businesses, the payment challenge is acute. Purchases are made across multiple sites by multiple people, and by the time finance teams piece together what has been spent and where, weeks may have passed. The administrative cost of that reconstruction is real and measurable, and it is being quietly absorbed by finance teams already stretched.
However, addressing this does not require a large-scale technology overhaul. When spend is captured and structured at the point of payment rather than reconstructed downstream, the reconciliation burden is reduced significantly. Control moves to the transaction, visibility improves rather than arriving retrospectively, and finance teams recover time that can be redirected to the higher-value work organisations actually need from them.
81% of the finance leaders in our research already see card-led payments as a competitive advantage, citing improvements in control, visibility and efficiency. For construction businesses managing distributed spend across projects, sites and supplier relationships, that improvement is structural.
The conversation about efficiency in construction finance too often starts with headcount or procurement cost, but I argue it should start with an honest assessment of where finance time is actually going and what it would take to get it back.
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