For years, manual finance was the “inconvenient” part of doing business. A bit slow. A clunky. Something to sort out later. That “later” just expired.
In 2026, manual processes aren’t just a headache; they’re a handbrake. Across funding, payments, invoicing, and spend control, small and medium-sized businesses are being held back not by ambition, but by the lack of real-time, reliable financial data. And in an economy where speed and certainty increasingly define who wins, if you’re not seeing data in real-time, you’re already behind.
SMEs remain the backbone of the UK economy, so why is getting funding still such a battle? Traditional banks often struggle to support modern SMEs because they’re tied down by strict criteria, slow decision-making, and blanket sector exclusions. Opportunities are missed simply because decisions take too long or because businesses don’t fit a narrow risk model.
This gap has fuelled the growth of alternative lenders who, according to the British Business Bank, are now deploying more funding to SMEs than traditional banks for the first time. But even alternative lenders are hitting the same wall: bad data. When your financial health is buried in manual reconciliations and delayed reports, you’re essentially invisible to the people who can help you grow. To (quickly) unlock this opportunity, you have to kill the manual mess.
Manual finance creates hidden costs that compound fast
The real cost of manual finance never shows up as a single line item. It’s stealthy. Instead, it’s the finance team losing tens of hours each month on manual invoice processing. It’s errors caused by rekeying data, the awkward emails to suppliers about late payments, and the missed early-payment discounts you didn’t see in time.
A mid-sized business processing a few hundred invoices per month can easily incur £20,000-£40,000 annually in avoidable costs, sponsored by Reward Funding (21 Jan 2026) when labour, errors, penalties and opportunity costs are taken into account.
But the biggest hit isn’t to your bank account, it’s to your strategy. When finance teams are stuck chasing receipts or manually reconciling spend, they’re not analysing cash flow, supporting growth decisions, or improving controls. And when leadership lacks real-time visibility, you lose the ability to move fast.
Why speed and certainty matter now more than ever
SMEs don’t look for funding or flexibility “just because”. They do it when there’s a window of opportunity – a snap hire, a bulk supplier deal, or a sudden chance to scale. As alternative lenders consistently point out, early clarity is the real MVP. Knowing you have the green light allows you to pivot while the trail is still hot. But speed depends on confidence. And you can have confidence if your data is buried somewhere in a shoebox. Manual finance is a lag in the system. It delays clarity, which stalls decisions. And delayed decisions kill growth.
Embedded finance changes the game
This is where embedded finance shifts the conversation. Not by adding more tools, but by removing friction from the systems SMEs already rely on. When payments, cards, spend controls, invoicing and reporting are embedded directly into platforms used by banks, accounting SaaS providers and PSPs:
The result? More than efficiency and confidence at scale – whether spend is predictable or variable.
And this is why partnerships across the ecosystem matter. At Pleo, working closely with partners like Mastercard allows us to combine global payment infrastructure with embedded, real-time spend intelligence, giving SMEs and their providers a shared, trusted view of financial reality. For lenders, platforms, and networks, this creates something critical: clean, timely, decision-ready data.
Stop processing. Start predicting.
Forward-thinking SMEs aren’t asking how to process faster. Instead, they’re asking: “How do we design finance so it doesn’t slow us down at all?”
When finance runs in the background, the benefits go far beyond a tidy inbox. It’s about gaining an advantage: faster access to capital, solid supplier relationships, better cash flow management, and the ability to make those strategic bets while competitors are still chasing receipts.
Again, many businesses are still treating automatic processes as a “next quarter” project. But, in 2026, next quarter (or even later) is expensive. The longer the delay, the more it compounds the manual mess, deepens the blind spots, and leaves you making big decisions with only half the story.
The question is no longer whether manual finance is inefficient - we know it is. The real question is whether SMEs and the partners that serve them can continue to afford to stay in the slow lane while the rest of the market moves to real-time.
The cost of waiting is rising. The cost to start is zero.
Curious to hear how embedded finance can help your business? Book a demo.