Updated: August 2026
Shadow work is the repetitive admin that sits around real work, from booking a trip and chasing receipts to checking policies, routing approvals, and coding invoices. It drains time and focus across the company, even though it rarely appears on a job description.
Perk’s The Cost of Shadow Work, a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Perk in September 2025, found that employees spend an average of seven hours a week on shadow work. Across the economy, that adds up to a $1.7 trillion drag on productivity.
The answer is not another isolated tool. It is a connected platform that automates routine work and applies the same rules across travel, expenses, and card payments, so people can make compliant choices without stopping to interpret policy or wait for manual checks.
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So what can you do about it? Watch the video below for a quick overview of how Perk tackles shadow work in practice, then read on for the full breakdown of the tools, technology, and steps to take to remove it from your teams for good.
Automate shadow work to power real work
Automation reduces shadow work when it removes manual handoffs, applies policy at the moment of spend, and keeps data moving into the systems finance already uses. That means fewer receipts to chase, fewer approvals stuck in inboxes, and fewer spreadsheets waiting for month-end.
The highest-value workflows are usually familiar ones: booking work travel, submitting expenses, reconciling card transactions, processing invoices, and checking whether a purchase meets company policy. When these steps sit in separate tools, every handoff creates more work. Employees re-enter information, approvers repeat checks, and finance reconstructs the transaction after the money has already moved.
Modern automation changes that sequence. A policy can guide a traveler toward compliant booking options. A card can enforce a spend limit at the point of purchase. A receipt can be matched to its transaction automatically. Approval workflows can route genuine exceptions to the right person, while routine spend moves on without unnecessary review.
This is how automation reduces costs: it lowers the effort required to process spend, reduces avoidable errors and duplicate work, and helps prevent out-of-policy purchases before they become a reimbursement, correction, or write-off. It also gives finance a clearer view of where money is going while there is still time to act.
Automation does not remove judgment from finance. It removes the repetitive checking and re-keying that prevents teams from using that judgment where it matters most.
Choose a platform built to power real work
A unified travel and spend platform gives companies one place to manage bookings, expenses, invoices, and card payments, with policy enforcement built into the flow of work. Perk is designed to do exactly that, bringing travel and spend together so rules are consistent wherever employees book, pay, or submit a claim.
Unified policy enforcement means setting travel and spend rules once, then applying them across the employee journey. In Perk, those rules can shape the travel options employees see, guide approval workflows for exceptions, and set limits on corporate cards. Instead of finding a policy breach after reimbursement, teams can prevent it or route it for approval before money is spent.
That matters because policy gaps often appear between systems. A travel policy may govern flights and hotels, while a separate expense tool checks claims after the trip, and a card program operates with its own limits. Employees are left to bridge the gaps themselves. Finance is left with incomplete data and inconsistent controls.
Perk brings those workflows together. Travel bookings, employee expenses, invoices, and card transactions sit in one intelligent platform, giving companies a single view of spend and a more consistent way to enforce policy.
For companies looking for software that unifies policy enforcement across travel, expenses, and cards, the key question is not whether each tool has a policy feature. It is whether the policy follows the spend across every workflow. Perk’s spend management platform is built around that connected model.
You need simple tech, not just smart tech
The best automation is easy to use because it makes the compliant path the practical path. If employees need four tools to book a trip, pay for it, submit receipts, and check approval status, the process still creates shadow work, even if each tool has useful features.
In the shadow work study, employees reported using an average of four tools to manage these tasks, while just 7% said their company had a well-integrated tech stack. Fragmentation creates its own cost. Information gets copied from one system to another, people lose time switching between tools, and finance teams spend more time reconciling data that should already be connected.
A unified platform does more than reduce the number of logins. It gives employees a clear route from booking to payment to expense completion, while giving finance one source of truth for controls, approvals, and reporting.
That is especially important for expense management software with card controls. A card program should not create a separate reconciliation project. When card transactions flow directly into expense management, receipts can be matched, policy can be checked, and finance can see the result in real time. Smart corporate cards make this possible by combining payment controls with expense automation in one workflow.
The practical result is simple: employees spend less time asking what to do next, and finance spends less time piecing together what already happened.
4 steps for reducing shadow work
Step 1: Own the problem
Shadow work is a company-wide operational issue, not an individual productivity problem. It touches employees making purchases, people approving them, and teams responsible for finance, travel, HR, and operations.
The research found that 37% of employees believe their manager should fix shadow work. In practice, the best results come when the company treats it as a shared process problem. The work may be happening in different departments, but the root causes are often the same: disconnected systems, unclear policies, manual approvals, and information that has to be entered more than once.
Start by looking for the tasks people repeatedly perform around travel and spend. Receipt chasing, booking through multiple channels, approving routine purchases by email, and manually coding transactions are useful signals. They show where the process is asking people to do work that technology can handle reliably.
Once leaders see shadow work as operational inefficiency, they can prioritize changes that help the whole company rather than expecting individuals to work around a broken process.
Step 2: Close the automation gap
The most effective automation targets high-volume, rules-based tasks that currently depend on manual review. Travel bookings, expense reporting, invoice processing, and card reconciliation are common examples because they involve repeatable steps, clear policies, and a high cost of delay.
Automating spend management reduces costs in several connected ways. It cuts the time spent on data entry and follow-up, reduces the chance of duplicate or incorrectly coded transactions, and makes it easier to stop non-compliant spend before it occurs. It also improves visibility, which helps teams identify recurring patterns such as unnecessary reimbursements, repeated exceptions, or spend that should move to a preferred supplier.
The goal is not to automate every decision. It is to automate the routine path and keep people focused on exceptions that require context.
Perk helps teams bring these workflows together through expense management and integrated payment controls. The result is a clearer operating model: policy is applied earlier, data is available sooner, and finance can focus on decisions rather than administration.
Step 3: Keep it simple
Reducing shadow work requires fewer disconnected systems and more connected workflows. Adding a separate tool for every problem can create more admin than it removes, especially when each system has its own approvals, data fields, and reporting logic.
A unified platform for travel and spend lets employees book travel, pay with controlled cards, submit expenses, and follow approval workflows in one place. For finance and operations, it creates a consolidated view of spend without repeated exports, imports, and spreadsheet checks.
Perk brings together travel bookings, expenses, invoices, and payments in one platform. That includes the day-to-day work that often creates the most friction: managing bookings, filing expenses, matching card transactions to receipts, handling approvals, and coding invoices.
It also supports a more consistent policy model. A company can set rules for travel booking and spending, then apply them across the workflows where those decisions happen. This is what integrated policy management software for travel and expenses should deliver: one policy framework, fewer gaps between systems, and less manual enforcement.
For a closer look at how card controls support that approach, see our guide to corporate card controls and spend policies.
Step 4: Power real work
When routine work runs in the background, employees and finance teams get time back for work that needs their attention. The benefit is not simply faster processing. It is fewer interruptions, more reliable controls, and a clearer picture of spend while decisions can still make a difference.
According to the shadow work study, employees spend an average of seven hours each week on these non-core tasks. That is time that can be returned to customer work, planning, project delivery, supplier relationships, and the many decisions that cannot be automated.
The strongest results come when employees have the autonomy to move quickly within clear boundaries. They can book an in-policy trip, use a company card within its limits, and submit a receipt without building an expense report from scratch. Finance keeps control through real-time visibility, automated checks, and audit-ready records.
That balance is the point of unified compliance software for company spend. It makes it easier to do the right thing, while giving the company the controls it needs to manage risk and protect the budget.
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The technology to remove shadow work is already here
The technology to remove shadow work is available now, and it works best when travel, expenses, invoices, and card payments operate as one connected system. Companies that bring these workflows together reduce manual processing, apply policy before spend happens, and give their teams a clearer view of what needs attention.
The cost benefits are practical and cumulative. Automating receipt capture and reconciliation reduces administrative effort. Applying policy during booking and payment prevents avoidable exceptions. Centralizing spend data makes it easier to identify recurring waste, manage budgets, and negotiate from a clearer view of supplier and travel spend.
MedSkin saw the impact of replacing fragmented travel and expense processes with Perk. The company achieved 26% cost savings, processed 45% of expenses within 24 hours, and improved efficiency threefold. Read how MedSkin unified travel and expense management with Perk
With the right technology in place, companies can:
Reduce the seven-hour weekly productivity drain caused by shadow work
Apply policy consistently across travel bookings, expenses, invoices, and card payments
Reduce manual data entry, receipt chasing, and reconciliation work
Prevent more out-of-policy spend before it happens
Give employees a simpler way to book, pay, and expense for work
Give finance clearer data for forecasting, governance, and month-end close
The work behind the work does not need to stay manual. See how Perk brings travel and spend together so your teams can focus on real work, with real impact.
Frequently asked questions
- Perk is an all-in-one platform for travel and spend, built to remove shadow work rather than add another tool to it. It brings together more than two thirds of the most frustrating shadow work tasks, including booking and managing travel, filing expenses, managing approvals, coding invoices, and matching card transactions to receipts, all in one place.
- Shadow work costs companies $1.7 trillion, driven by employees spending an average of 7 hours a week on manual tasks like filing expenses, coding invoices, and chasing approvals. Automating those tasks removes the manual steps that create both the cost and the hours, freeing teams to focus on other work instead.
- Shadow work is the non-core, repetitive tasks that pile up around every job, like booking travel, filing expenses, coding invoices, and chasing approvals. According to The Cost of Shadow Work, a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Perk (September 2025), it costs companies $1.7 trillion as employees spend an average of 7 hours a week on it.
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