One of the unavoidable consequences of growth is distance.

As organisations grow in size and complexity, it is almost inevitable that leaders will find themselves at a greater distance from the day-to-day realities of the work. Information is filtered through layers of management, then summarised into reports and condensed into dashboards. None of this should come as a shock, nor is it inherently a problem. After all, a CFO cannot possibly review every transaction, just as a chief executive cannot attend every customer meeting. Still, it is difficult to escape the sense that something important is often lost along the way.

The further we drift from the work itself, the more we come to depend on representations of reality, rather than reality itself. Metrics, executive summaries and reports become our guides to what is happening across the organisation. For the most part, this approach serves us well. Every now and then, though, it leaves us with blind spots. The dashboard may tell us what happened, the report may point us to where we should look, but neither is particularly forthcoming about why.

The further we move from the work itself, the more dependent we become on representations of reality rather than reality itself. Losing context, is the price you pay.

I found myself reflecting on this recently while listening to an episode of the Soldo CFO Playbook podcast featuring Andy Mullineaux, CFO of Moke International. During the conversation, Andy described spending a weekend in the warehouse identifying parts for cars that had been built several years earlier. What I found interesting was not that a CFO was willing to help in the warehouse. It was that he still knew enough about the work to be useful. He had remained sufficiently close to the business to understand a problem that, on the surface, had very little to do with finance.

It is tempting to see stories like this as lessons in humility: the senior leader rolling up their sleeves, the executive willing to take on the unglamorous task. There is some truth in that, of course, but I suspect the more interesting lesson is about proximity.

What I liked most about Andy’s story was that he had not become too distant from the reality of the business. He understood something about how the product was made, how the operation worked and why a seemingly minor issue in a warehouse could matter. That kind of understanding becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as organisations grow, particularly for finance leaders whose role often pulls them further away from the practical decisions through which the business actually operates.

“Accuracy is not the same as understanding”

The Problem With Abstraction

The challenge, of course, is that leaders become more remote precisely because they are doing what the organisation expects of them: attending more meetings, taking on broader responsibilities, and shifting their focus from individual decisions to patterns, risks and forecasts. Over time, their understanding of the business is filtered through reports, reviews and summaries.

This is not intended as a criticism. Scale inevitably requires a degree of abstraction, and leaders need information organised in ways that make decision-making possible. The difficulty comes when our representations of reality begin to take the place of reality itself.

When Visibility Is Not Understanding

A monthly report might show that travel spend has increased; a dashboard might reveal that software costs are running ahead of budget. All of this information may be perfectly accurate, but accuracy is not the same as understanding. The numbers do not reveal the urgency of a problem, the opportunity that appeared unexpectedly, or the reasons that made a particular decision feel not only reasonable, but necessary. What tends to disappear first is not visibility; it is context.

Finance leaders have to be many things at once. On the one hand, they are expected to be more strategic than ever. On the other hand, organisations rightly want decisions to happen closer to the point of need. Teams need autonomy; managers need speed, and employees need the ability to solve problems without waiting for every decision to be escalated.

The further spending decisions move from the centre, the more important it becomes for finance to remain connected to them. Not because finance should control every decision – far from it – but because finance cannot support what it does not understand.

Why Context Matters in Spend Management

Historically, finance maintained its proximity through process: expense claims, purchase requests and invoices all passed through the function at some point. The system was rarely elegant – few would claim otherwise – but it did ensure that finance saw not only the cost of decisions, but often some of the reasoning behind them.

As organisations have modernised, much of that centralised control has disappeared — and rightly so. Businesses need speed as much as oversight. The difficulty is that decentralisation has not always brought with it a better form of connection. Spending now happens in real time, while finance is often left to make sense of it after the fact. By the time month-end arrives, the decision has already been made, the money has already been spent, and much of the context has vanished. 

Spend is rarely just spend. It often reveals something about how the organisation is operating: where teams are improvising, where processes are unclear, where growth is creating pressure, or where people are finding ways around systems that no longer serve them especially well. The real value lies not simply in seeing the transaction, but in understanding its context while that context still exists.

Modern spend management is not simply about visibility or control; it is about preserving the context that helps finance make better decisions. Its value is often described in terms of control, efficiency and visibility — and those benefits are certainly important. Yet I suspect its deeper value lies in reducing the distance between finance and the decisions being made across the organisation.

At its best, spend management does not drag every decision back to the centre. Instead, it allows finance to remain connected while decisions continue to happen where they should: close to the work, close to the customer, and close to the operational need. It creates a way for autonomy and oversight to coexist, without forcing the organisation to choose between speed and control.

The goal is not to make finance omnipresent; it is to preserve connection in organisations where decisions are increasingly distributed. The real risk in decentralised spend is not simply that finance loses control — it is that finance loses touch.

Control and connection are not the same thing. Organisations often focus on preserving control while unintentionally allowing context to disappear.

Staying Close to the Work

I have seen versions of this in many different contexts, not only in finance. Some of the most useful lessons I have learned about organisations have come from moments that looked entirely unstrategic at the time: assembling backup drives because an order needed to be fulfilled, or spending an evening putting stamps on packages because they simply had to go out. Neither task would ever make it into a strategy document, but both revealed things about the business that no report could have shown.

This is not an argument for leaders to turn themselves into permanent problem-solvers. There is a fine line between staying close to the work and being unable to let go of it. Still, there is value in remaining close enough to remember what the work feels like from the inside.

For finance leaders, the equivalent is not spending weekends in warehouses or personally reviewing every transaction. Rather, it is about designing ways to stay connected to the decisions that shape the business, without suffocating them.

Perhaps that is why Andy’s story appealed to me so much. The more I reflect on it, the less I see it as a story about a CFO helping in a warehouse. To me, it is a story about proximity: about remaining close enough to the realities of the business to understand why seemingly small details matter.

As organisations grow, decisions inevitably move further away from the centre. By the time spend has been neatly summarised at month-end, the work has already happened, the decision has already been made and the context is inevitably fading.

And context, more often than not, is where good judgment begins.