What to Do When You Have a Team of Experts… Still Doing the Financial Admin

You hired (or built) a team for their expertise. Their judgement. Their experience. Their ability to solve problems quickly and move the business forward.

So why does it still feel like they’re spending half their week on financial admin?

• Chasing receipts

• Coding expenses

• Updating spreadsheets

• Pulling numbers for reports

• Following up on invoices

• Fixing “small” bookkeeping issues that keep popping up

• Copying and pasting between systems

  
  

If your experts are still doing the financial admin, it’s not a “people problem”. It’s usually a structure problem and it’s fixable.

1) Start by naming the real cost (it’s bigger than time)

Financial admin doesn’t just take time. It quietly steals:

• Momentum (work slows down because people are constantly interrupted)

• Quality (expert work gets squeezed into the gaps)

• Morale (high performers don’t love being treated like general admin support)

• Profit (you’re paying premium rates for low-value tasks)

  
  

A simple question to ask: “What is the hourly value of this person’s expertise and what are we currently using it for?”

If a senior expert is doing tasks that could be done by a finance admin, coordinator, VA, or automated workflow, you’re effectively overpaying for the outcome.

2) Do a “Two-Week Financial Admin Audit” (quick, not painful)

For two weeks, ask each expert to track:

• Any finance task that feels repetitive

• Any finance task that doesn’t require their level of skill

• Any task they “just do because it’s quicker”

  
  

You don’t need fancy software. A shared doc works.

At the end, you’re looking for patterns like:

• Receipt chasing and expense queries

• Supplier set-up and payment admin

• Invoice creation and follow-up

• Credit control and “just checking in” emails

• Month-end prep and tidy-up

• Reporting requests that always come last-minute

  
  

This gives you evidence, not opinions and makes the next steps much easier to implement.

3) Separate financial admin into three categories (so you fix the right thing)

Most teams try to solve this with one solution (“we need an assistant” or “we need a new system”). But financial admin usually falls into three categories:

• A: Financial admin that should be eliminated If nobody can explain why it exists, it probably shouldn’t.

• B: Financial admin that should be automated Think templates, forms, rules, recurring invoices, auto-reminders, and system-to-system handoffs.

• C: Financial admin that should be delegated Human tasks that still need doing, just not by your experts.

  
  

This is the difference between reducing financial admin and simply reassigning it.

4) Build a “front line” around your experts

Experts do their best work when they’re protected from constant context switching.

That protection can look like:

• A dedicated finance admin/coordinator role

• A shared finance inbox with triage rules

• A VA who owns invoice follow-ups, supplier onboarding, and receipt chasing

• Clear internal request processes (so everything isn’t a last-minute message)

  
  

The goal isn’t to create bureaucracy. It’s to create flow.

5) Create a single “way of working” (and stop reinventing the wheel)

If every expert has their own way of raising invoices, coding costs, tracking payments, and storing documents, admin multiplies.

Pick one approach and standardise it:

• A single process for raising and approving invoices

• Templates for common finance emails (payment chasers, receipt requests, supplier info)

• A consistent file structure for finance documents

• A clear definition of “done” for recurring tasks

  
  

Standardisation is what makes delegation and automation actually stick.

6) Assign ownership (because “everyone” means “no one”)

This is where most fixes fall apart.

If you want experts out of financial admin, someone has to own:

• Keeping templates up to date

• Maintaining the workflow

• Monitoring bottlenecks

• Training new team members into the process

  
  

That ownership might sit with an ops lead, finance manager, senior admin, or external support team,  but it must be clear.

7) Protect expert time like it’s a revenue stream 

Once you’ve cleaned up the financial admin, don’t let it creep back in.

A simple rule that works well: If a task can be done by someone else in under 80% of the time, it should be delegated.

Your experts don’t need to be the fastest at financial admin. They need to be the best at what only they can do.

The Bottom Line

If you have a team of experts still doing the financial admin, you don’t need them to “work harder”.

You need to:

• Identify what’s stealing their time

• Eliminate what’s unnecessary

• Automate what’s repeatable

• Delegate what doesn’t require expertise

• Standardise the way finance tasks move through the business

  
  

That’s how you get your experts back where they belong: doing the work that actually grows the business.

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