This maybe for travel expenses but it's the same story for so many things
1. Start with a mostly manual, people labor based, system that works well (handing Joann receipts) 2. It begins to not cost-scale well with growth (department size increases) or a salesmen comes around with a service that offers to do the same thing for less (Concur) or both 3. The company switches to reduce costs 4. The new service is cheaper partly because it offloads work onto employees (filling out travel expense forms) and by cheaping out on the experience (not caring that the forms are not easy to understand and the system is annoying to use) 5. Employees now have to spend time doing a task they never did and their experience is worse
And it stays in this state forever because the observable costs (service cost vs some number of Joann's) are less. The fact that expensive employees (A department full of Phd's) are now wasting time and being annoyed by this system are not seen. The hours used to fill out those forms and lost productivity due to anger are never accounted for. Also the higher ups are detached because they still have their own personal Joann's taking care of everything.
I always say, that finance departments can easily calculate costs. But opportunity costs most of the time don't make it into the books.
Why do you assume it is finance departments making these decisions?
Finance departments get hit with the same clueless 'cost saving' as everyone else! Often because the savings are so 'obvious' to MBA wielding middle managers, the decisions are made without Finance advice.
It is also often just a corporate politics thing. Your department has to save money, but there is no measure of how much money you cost other departments. In my experience this is more often done to Finance than by them. Pushing more work from frontline departments to back office departments sounds great to an Ops manager, and this frontline departments often contain people who are good at selling their idea.