The most successful businesses are creating something unique. Whether it’s an original value proposition or a product that goes beyond what the market is offering.

But even the boldest decision-makers ask themselves a familiar question: “Am I doing this right?” The helm of a business is often a lonely place to be. And while your own teams can inform and confirm your strategy, it’s the competition that ultimately determines how far behind or ahead of them you are.

This is what makes spend benchmarks so useful – they don’t just tell us what companies are buying; they tell us what leaders truly believe drives performance.

And in 2025, the data tells a different story than many might expect.

Spend benchmarks – the anchor businesses need

In previous years, team budgets have been defined by major reactive shifts.

Pandemics, recessions, inflation, a rollercoaster of a business environment – there has been no shortage of events that have led leaders to rip up their share of spend (SoS) plans, and start again.

Last year, however, was a calmer year. According to proprietary spend data from Pleo’s +40,000 customers, when it came to card spend, the average transaction value (ATV) experienced modest growth (+4.9% YoY). This means that teams handled macro headwinds in their stride and managed to keep the ATV down – spending similar amounts per purchase to what they did in 2024.

Seasonal shifts also failed to provide the drama. And despite predictable seasonal peaks in August and December, transaction amounts remained broadly stable.

All this raises two questions: Firstly, how did spend manage to stay so low? And secondly, why if 2025 was such a boring spend year, should finance teams care? The answer to both comes down to the rise of one thing: effective decision-making.

Let’s dive into the data behind the discipline.

2025: More pressure. Better judgement

Boring spend doesn’t mean that 2025 was a quiet year. Especially for financial decision-makers.

Annual inflation stabilised at ~2.1% across Europe, leaving no room for error or wasted spend. While travel roared back, with Western Europe accounting for 88% of total European business travel spend. Tech also continued to move at a pace, with 88% of companies globally reporting regular AI use in at least one business function. All this confirms why 65% of CFOs say they were making more high-level decisions than they were 12 months earlier.

How then, despite plenty of macroeconomic noise, did corporate spend manage to stay uneventful – quiet, even. That’s easy: Finance teams got better at decision-making and ensured that macroeconomic noise didn’t deter them from sustainably scaling their business.

Last year, companies were allocating a healthy chunk of the share of spend (SoS) to ‘run the business’ infrastructure, including software (SoS 11.5%) and marketing (SoS 10.4%). This gave teams the tools, subscriptions and growth activity they needed to stay agile and to focus on strategic, not busy, work.

But what really marked 2025 out is how typically ‘discretionary spend’ held up too. When financial pressure rises, activities related to employee engagement are typically the first to go. But last year, meals and drinks (SoS 7.5%), office expenses (SoS 4.9%) and entertainment (SoS 4.7%) formed a meaningful chunk of spend. This showed that businesses are committed to employee-focused investments, and finally get that this is a lever to pull not just for engagement levels, but business output.

From software tools to customer outreach; team events to a positive office environment – businesses were enabling distributed, everyday purchases that gave employees what they needed to do their job.

Breaking this down even further, the top merchants by number of paying customers shows how this ranged from short-distance travel with Uber, to office supplies from IKEA, accelerated workflows with OpenAI, and even McDonald’s – proving that even Big Macs have a role to play in driving business performance.

The key to investing through uncertainty

Even when the chips are down, companies are focused on maintaining momentum and, as a result, growth. They are not being forced into reactionary cuts that might save money in the short-term, but ultimately cause operational damage in the long-term.

What’s crucial to this approach is financial foresight. Stability isn’t incidental, it’s intentional. Leaders must be able to safeguard spend for their most critical business factors, and to protect them from cuts before they even happen. This means staying alert to unforeseen and unexpected events.

With more decisions to make than ever, finance leaders have their work cut out for them. But this underlines the need for them to unleash their craft; to do more of what they got into the job for, in the first place. So less managing approvals and correcting out-of-policy spend, and more making effective spend decisions that unlock people, performance and profit.

Sabrina Qian is Product Director at Pleo.