Finance Operations
What a good expense policy looks like
The best expense policies are short, clear, and trusted. A practical guide to writing one your team will actually read.
Richmond Asare
Team Lead
Most expense policies are written to be defensible, not readable. They cover every edge case, anticipate every abuse, and run for pages nobody finishes. The result is a document that protects the company legally and helps the team not at all.
Write for the honest majority
The vast majority of your team wants to do the right thing. They just need to know what it is. A policy written to stop the rare bad actor punishes everyone else with complexity. Write for the people who will follow the rules, and handle the exceptions as exceptions.
- State what is reimbursable in plain language.
- Give clear limits so nobody has to guess.
- Explain what to do when something falls outside the rules.
If your team cannot summarize your expense policy from memory, it is too long to be useful.
A good policy is a tool, not a shield. When people understand it, they follow it, and the whole system gets easier to run.
Richmond Asare
Team Lead
Richmond leads product and strategy at Monytar. He writes about finance operations, spend culture, and building software that finance teams actually enjoy using.
