The Hidden Cost: Why Meeting and Event Spend Still Escapes the CFO’s Line of Sight
By Talia Mashiach, CEO & Founder of Eved
Meetings and events have become essential levers of growth, connection, and culture. Yet for many large organizations, they remain one of the least visible areas of spend.
Even though this category represents millions in annual investment, much of it sits outside traditional financial oversight, spread across credit cards, agency milestone payments, and manual approvals. The result is lost visibility, lost leverage, and higher exposure to fraud.
The Speed and Control Paradox
Traditional ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle, and Workday were designed for recurring suppliers and standardized processes. But the meetings and events category operates on an entirely different rhythm: hundreds of short term vendors, accelerated timelines, and project based budgets.
Faced with these demands, business users often choose speed over compliance. Payments are made via credit cards or routed through third party agencies that pay multiple suppliers on their behalf. It gets the job done, but it breaks the visibility chain for finance.
Approvals become reactive, data aggregation lags by weeks, and by the time the CFO sees the numbers, the spend is already gone.
Why Onboarding Is the Bottleneck
The core issue is not lack of discipline, it is system design.
Enterprise grade platforms make vendor onboarding deliberately rigorous to ensure compliance, security, and tax validation. But that process, while necessary for strategic suppliers, is impractical for the dozens or hundreds of one time vendors supporting a single conference or campaign.
Onboarding each one through the ERP can take days or weeks, so teams find workarounds. Payments go off system, and the financial data never flows back.
In other words, the enterprise’s own control infrastructure is inadvertently driving spend into the shadows.
New Risks in a New Era
This off system activity is not just inefficient, it is risky. AI driven fraud schemes are increasingly targeting decentralized payment flows, using deepfake communications and vendor impersonation tactics that exploit the absence of secure, auditable channels.
When payments are initiated via email or through card transactions instead of verified networks, finance teams lose the ability to authenticate identities and prevent manipulation before it happens.
For CFOs, these blind spots are no longer operational nuisances, they are risk vectors.
The Rise of Purpose Built Financial Systems
Forward looking finance teams are addressing this problem not by forcing agility heavy categories into the ERP, but by extending enterprise governance through purpose built systems.
These platforms are designed specifically for categories like meetings and events, where speed, flexibility, and compliance must coexist. They provide faster vendor onboarding, payment control, and direct data integration back into corporate accounting.
The goal is not to replace the ERP, it is to bridge the gap between the business’s need for flexibility and finance’s need for control.
By leveraging category specific solutions, organizations can capture event spend in real time, maintain compliance, and retain audit ready data without slowing down the teams executing the work.
From Lost Spend to Strategic Intelligence
When spend that once lived off system becomes visible, it transforms from a risk into a source of strategic value.
With detailed invoice level data, CFOs can:
Track spend by region, event type, or business unit
Identify and mitigate cost overruns before they happen
Strengthen supplier negotiations and preferred partnerships
Improve forecasting accuracy and audit efficiency
Visibility enables control, and control enables insight. The same mechanisms that prevent fraud also help finance leaders unlock new value from a traditionally opaque category.
Five Actions CFOs Can Take Now
Map Off System Spend – Identify where credit cards, agency intermediaries, or milestone payments have replaced formal AP processes.
Assess Onboarding Friction – Determine where the existing ERP vendor setup process slows down critical workflows.
Adopt Purpose Built Controls – For categories like events, marketing, and production, implement systems that support secure, high velocity payments and integrate back into the ERP.
Layer in AI Aware Fraud Detection – Introduce verification and escalation rules that address deepfake and impersonation tactics.
Measure the ROI of Visibility – Quantify cost avoidance, fraud reduction, and improved forecasting accuracy once spend is captured in real time.
The Path Forward: Speed and Flexibility Without Blind Spots
Meetings and events will always move fast, and they should. But agility does not have to mean opacity.
With the right financial infrastructure, CFOs can support business teams that demand flexibility while maintaining the compliance, auditability, and control required by the enterprise.
Purpose-built financial systems designed for these dynamic categories are proving that speed and governance can finally coexist, and that the fastest way to protect the enterprise may be to bring its most agile spend back into view.
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CFO Drive, Vol. 9
CFO Drive is the premier destination for CFO's and finance leaders seeking in-depth insights and resources.
