Why embedded finance is turning accounting from a burden into a growth engine.
Accounting has always been a headache. Nobody founds a business because they’re excited about reconciling receipts or untangling R&D tax credit claims. But ignore it, and the whole show collapses.
For too long, accounting has been treated as a compliance chore rather than a strategic lever. That mindset is outdated, and technology is about to blow it up.
The Accounting Problem
Take R&D tax credits. They should be a lifeline for SMEs, yet claiming them is still a bureaucratic hellscape. Businesses leave money on the table because the process is too slow, opaque, or complex.
It’s not just R&D. VAT, payroll, and expense management all follow the same broken pattern. Disconnected systems, endless manual work, and compliance stress sap energy from founders and finance teams alike.
The result? Accounting becomes an anchor, dragging on growth instead of fuelling it.
Where Embedded Finance Gets Interesting
This is where embedded finance comes in. We’ve already seen it reshape payments, lending, and loyalty. But its real, under-appreciated impact will be in accounting.
Imagine if your financial infrastructure didn’t just process payments but automatically pushed the data into your books — correctly categorised, tax-ready, and reconciled in real time.
- R&D credits: eligible expenses flagged and queued for submission as they happen, not months later.
- Expenses: embedded card data flowing directly into accounting software, no crumpled receipts required.
- Cash flow: live forecasting driven by orchestrated data, not stale spreadsheets.
The vision isn’t about another app. It’s about orchestration — stitching together banking, tax, and accounting so data flows without friction.
Orchestration Is the Missing Piece
Today, banks hold one dataset, accounting platforms hold another, and regulators hold yet another. None of them talk. That’s where the pain lives.
Orchestration is the connective tissue. It lets data move securely across systems, so a payment made today instantly lands in the right ledger, gets categorised, and if eligible, contributes to an R&D claim.
No more year-end fire drills. No more missed opportunities. No more compliance theatre.
Why Now
With regulation tightening and margins under pressure, SMEs can’t afford inefficiency. Missing a tax credit or botching a VAT return isn’t a minor irritation — it’s a direct hit to survival.
At the same time, customers expect seamless digital experiences everywhere else. Why should accounting still feel like the 1990s?
The combination of embedded finance and orchestration means we can finally drag accounting into the modern age — and turn it into a driver of growth, not a drag on it.
The End of the Back Office
Let’s be blunt: founders shouldn’t need to become tax experts to keep their companies alive. CFOs shouldn’t waste days reconciling siloed systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
Accounting, as we know it, is finished. Back-office grunt work is being replaced by orchestrated financial ecosystems that handle compliance automatically and surface insights in real time.
The winners will be the businesses that embrace this shift early — freeing leaders to focus on growth, strategy, and innovation rather than chasing paperwork.
The back office is dead. Orchestration killed it. And good riddance. The future belongs to businesses ready to step into the light.
