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Administrative assistants, executive assistants, and office managers have always been the operational backbone of an organisation.
On paper, your responsibilities look straightforward: managing calendars, coordinating meetings, organising travel, handling invoices, supporting executives, keeping processes moving. But in reality, your role is far more complex.
You operate in the gaps.
Between leadership and finance. Between travellers and policy. Between vendors and internal teams. Between what should happen and what actually does.
Over time, this creates a layer of invisible coordination work — the constant follow-ups, clarifications, approvals, corrections, and reconciliations that keep everything functioning. It’s necessary. It’s rarely documented. And it often expands without anyone noticing.
This is shadow work.
Not the core responsibilities listed in your job description, but the work behind them. The manual steps, interruptions, and fragmented systems that quietly consume hours each week.
For many administrative professionals, shadow work is most visible across three areas:
Business travel coordination
Expense and spend management
Group travel and company events
Let’s break down where that friction shows up — and how it can be reduced.
The problems: where shadow work shows up in administrative roles
Travel coordination across fragmented tools
Booking travel for executives or teams rarely happens in a single, clean workflow.
You might:
Compare flights across multiple sites
Cross-check options against a travel policy stored in a PDF
Confirm preferences over email
Wait for approval in Slack or Teams
Forward confirmations manually
Rebuild itineraries in a separate document
If travellers book themselves, the complexity doesn’t disappear — it shifts. You’re still answering policy questions, clarifying budgets, tracking who is traveling, and stepping in when something goes wrong.
When bookings happen across disconnected tools, you end up piecing together the full picture manually:
Who’s travelling next week?
Was that hotel within budget?
Has this trip been approved?
Where can I find the invoice?
Each question seems small. Together, they create ongoing administrative load.
Manual approvals and policy confusion
Even when a company has a travel policy, it often lives outside the booking flow.
That means you’re fielding questions like:
“Is this hotel allowed?”
“There aren’t any options in policy, what should I do?”
“Can we make an exception just this once?”
Instead of the policy guiding decisions automatically, you become the interpreter. You review options manually. You chase approvals. You escalate exceptions.
Approvals can bounce between email threads, chat messages, and calendar invites. A one-minute decision turns into five messages and two reminders.
Over time, you become the bottleneck — not because you want control, but because the system requires you to intervene.
Last-minute executive changes and after-hours disruptions
Executive travel comes with higher stakes.
A missed connection. A cancelled train. A meeting added at the last minute.
When plans shift, you’re often the first point of contact.
If there’s no structured support system in place:
Travellers call or message you directly
You spend evenings on hold with airlines
You rework itineraries manually
You worry about fees and refunds
Even small disruptions can feel high-pressure when they involve senior leadership.
The emotional load is real. The expectation is clear: fix it fast, keep it seamless, and don’t let it disrupt the executive’s focus.
Chasing receipts, invoices, and expense reconciliation
For many administrative professionals, the work doesn’t end when the trip does.
You still need to:
Collect missing receipts
Ask for hotel invoices
Clarify what a charge was for
Manually log expenses in spreadsheets
Cross-check transactions against bookings
Follow up when something doesn’t match
Sometimes the receipt is lost.
Sometimes the traveler forgets.
Sometimes finance needs more detail.
And you’re the one in the middle.
Travel may be booked in one system. Expenses submitted in another. Card payments tracked somewhere else.
At month-end, that often means rebuilding the full picture manually — matching confirmations to transactions, attaching documents, and explaining discrepancies.
It’s not strategic work. But it’s work that has to get done.
Event coordination across spreadsheets and disconnected systems
Administrative roles frequently expand into event planning.
Off-sites. Leadership summits.Team kick-offs. Client gatherings.
Coordinating events means managing:
Venue sourcing
Attendee lists
Travel bookings
Budget tracking
Supplier invoices
Often across:
Spreadsheets
Email threads
Shared drives
Multiple booking platforms
Tracking who has booked, who hasn’t, how much has been spent, and what still needs approval becomes a manual exercise.
Instead of orchestrating the experience, you’re stitching together information from multiple sources.
Acting as the bridge between finance, leadership, and travellers
Perhaps the most invisible layer of shadow work is relational.
You:
Clarify policies on behalf of finance
Explain budgets to travellers
Update leadership on costs
Reassure executives about logistics
Follow up with vendors
You sit at the intersection of multiple expectations.
When systems are fragmented, you become the connector — manually aligning information that should already be aligned.
The solution: reducing administrative shadow work with one connected system
Reducing shadow work isn’t about removing responsibility. It’s about removing unnecessary manual steps.
A connected travel, spend, and events platform like Perk helps shift routine coordination from people to workflows.
Here’s how that plays out in practice.
Structured travel booking with embedded policies
When travel policies live inside the booking flow, you don’t have to enforce them manually.
With Perk:
Travellers can access thousands of flight options, hotels and apartments, rail providers, and car rental companies at competitive, negotiated rates
Preferred suppliers and budgets are embedded into search results
Travel policies are applied automatically at the point of booking
Executives don’t feel restricted.
Travellers don’t feel limited.
And you don’t need to cross-check every booking manually.
Instead of comparing multiple websites and interpreting policy after the fact, you configure guardrails once — and let the system surface compliant, high-quality options automatically.
You maintain full visibility into who is traveling, when, and how much is being spent — without rebuilding reports or chasing confirmations.
For Tanja Peronne, Executive Administrative Assistant at FREENOW, centralising travel booking with Perk helped free up 40% of the time previously spent coordinating trips across multiple tools and payment methods.
Automated approvals that remove bottlenecks
Manual approval chains slow down bookings and create unnecessary back-and-forth. But approvals don’t have to be all or nothing.
With Perk, your organisation can define how strict or flexible the travel program should be. You decide which trips are auto-approved, which require review, and how dynamic budgets adapt to real market conditions.
When prices fluctuate, budgets adjust within defined limits, reducing unnecessary exceptions and last-minute escalations.
Perk allows:
Auto-approval of in-policy trips, while routing genuine exceptions to the right approver
Dynamic budgets that adapt to destination and timing
Centralised approval visibility in one dashboard
Approval requests can be reviewed and actioned directly within your existing workflows, thanks to integrations with tools like Slack, Monday, and ClickUp
Travellers gain clarity on what’s allowed before they book. Finance gains transparency. And you avoid being the default gatekeeper for every single trip.
At FREENOW, giving employees the freedom to book independently while maintaining compliance was essential.
Approvals no longer live in scattered email threads or chat messages. They follow clearly defined rules embedded into the system, so you don’t have to manage them manually.
Integrated expense and spend management that simplifies reconciliation
When travel and expenses are connected from the start, much of that manual follow-up disappears.
Perk brings travel bookings, events, expense management, and invoice payments together in one intelligent platform, but also integrates directly with other leading expense and spend management platforms such as BILL Spend & Expense, Ramp, Pleo, Spendesk, Expensify, allowing travel data to flow automatically into your existing financial setup.
Through these integrations:
Travel transactions sync automatically
Invoices are attached at the source
Cost categories can be predefined
Travel spend becomes visible in real time
Instead of reconstructing a trip’s expenses line by line in Excel, the data is already aligned across systems.
Finance gains cleaner records. Executives don’t need to forward every receipt manually. You spend less time reconciling transactions and fielding month-end questions from accounting.
Reconciliation becomes part of the workflow, not an additional project.
At GMG EnviroSafe, reconciliation that once took days was reduced to just three hours after integrating Perk with their expense systems.
Smarter traveler experience that reduces interruptions
Even when policies and approvals are structured, travel rarely goes exactly as planned.
Flights change. Meetings move.
Trains get cancelled. Small booking adjustments become time-consuming back-and-forth.
With Perk, you can:
Access 24/7 support via phone, email, or chat anytime
Get fast, precise answers based on actual trip details with Juno, our AI-powered assistant
Make updates to flights and hotels in just a few clicks, without long back-and-forth exchanges
Rely on built-in flexibility with FlexiTravel, where trips are 80% refundable when plans change, up to 2 hours before departure
Stay informed with live travel updates and real-time alerts for delays and disruptions, so you’re not fielding constant status questions or manually checking itineraries.
Provide additional reassurance through medical and baggage insurance options
Instead of being the first line of support for every change, you gain a structured and flexible system that keeps travel predictable, protected, and easier to manage.
For Claire Little, Personal Assistant at GoCardless, that shift translated into a 60% reduction in time spent managing travel changes and disruptions.
Premium executive travel without the paperwork
Supporting senior leaders often comes with higher expectations and less margin for error. When visibility is high and schedules are tight, small disruptions can quickly become visible problems.
Perk’s VIP Experience provides a dedicated, white-glove layer of support for high-profile travellers. VIP bookers and travellers receive priority access to an experienced team available 24/7, proactive trip monitoring to anticipate disruptions before they escalate, and a highly personalised service that consistently manages executive preferences.
Some trips require arrangements that go beyond standard bookings. With Premium and Pro plans, Concierge support allows you to request additional services such as airport transfers, Airbnbs, buses, ferries, restaurant reservations, or event tickets — all coordinated through a single point of contact.
If your organisation is tracking environmental impact, Green Trip provides built-in emissions reporting and visibility, so you don’t have to compile sustainability data manually for leadership or finance.
Executives receive a seamless, high-touch experience. You reduce high-stakes coordination pressure and step away from managing every detail yourself.
When that level of support matters most, it shows. During a late-night strike in Germany, Kantox’s COO, Toni Rami, faced being stranded abroad. Perk’s VIP support team worked through the night to reroute him via Prague and secure a flight home by morning.
As Johanna Bravo, Office Manager & Executive Assistant at Kantox, recalls:
Centralised group travel and event coordination
Organising off-sites, leadership meetings, or company-wide gatherings often means juggling spreadsheets, chasing RSVPs, requesting venue quotes one by one, and manually coordinating travel for multiple attendees. For many assistants, events quickly become an additional layer of administrative work on top of everything else.
With Perk Events, you can:
Search and compare venues that fit your needs in one place, then let AI handle quote requests on your behalf
Centralise attendee lists and manage registrations within the same platform as travel
Create custom event pages to share key information, track RSVPs, monitor arrivals, collect feedback, and gather details such as food allergies or clothing sizes
Allow participants to book their own travel within policy, without re-entering their details
Keep travel and event costs connected, with real-time visibility across the full budget
Access dedicated event specialists for additional coordination support when needed
Instead of juggling spreadsheets, inboxes, and booking tools, you manage everything from one structured system. Event coordination becomes structured and transparent, reducing the manual follow-up and repetitive admin that often falls on your shoulders.
One unified platform for travel, spend, and events
Administrative roles have evolved far beyond basic coordination.
Today, you’re responsible for:
Managing executive expectations
Protecting budgets
Maintaining compliance
Coordinating cross-functional workflows
Ensuring seamless experiences
Shadow work accumulates when systems don’t work together — when policies sit outside bookings, when expenses require manual matching, and when events are managed in isolation. The same information gets entered more than once. The same numbers are reconciled twice. And you often end up acting as the bridge between disconnected tools.
Reducing that friction doesn’t diminish your role. It strengthens it.
When travel and events operate within one connected system, and expense data syncs automatically into your financial workflows, information flows instead of being copied manually, approvals follow structured workflows, and costs align from the start.
You spend less time:
Chasing approvals
Fixing preventable issues
Reconciling transactions
Managing after-hours disruptions
And more time:
Supporting leadership strategically
Improving coordination
Enhancing traveler experience
Strengthening collaboration with finance
Perk helps reduce the work behind the work, so administrative professionals can focus on what truly drives impact across the organisation.
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See how Perk helps power real work
Because when shadow work is reduced, real work has room to thrive — the work that supports leadership, strengthens collaboration, and keeps the business moving forward with clarity and confidence.
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