Mastering spend management: Automate your expense reporting with Pleo

Month’s end. Time to reconcile expenses and sign-off the books.

With Pleo’s spending solution, all company expenses are captured in one place, to allow for a complete spending overview across projects, categories, people, teams, and entities. 

Let’s take a look at how to use the Export feature, and how moving expenses from Pleo to your accounting system of choice helps avoid bookkeeping mistakes and potential issues down the line. 

How to export for easier reconciliation 

First things first, you need to make sure the integration to your accounting system is up and running before exporting. You can do this in Settings once you're up and running with your Pleo account.

Now it’s time to Export! 

Different ways to export 

• One by one: It’s never a bad idea to double check each transaction one last time. Exporting one at a time provides a more in-depth look at each expense before sending it off for reconciliation. Filter by date, account, transactions missing information or vendor name for a more specific view.
• Bulk edit: For any regular expenses with the same accounts, tags or tax codes, editing in bulk can speed up the process. Filtering for these types of transactions and updating them all at the same time cuts out the repetitive tasks that can waste time. 

Different queues for different stages

Picture this: you have a bunch of receipts in one hand, an extra strong coffee in the other and a month’s worth of expense reports piled on your desk. Each expense has to be manually reconciled, entered into Excel and then manually uploaded to your accounting software and/or ERP. Some expenses are missing receipts, some are missing information, some of the approved get mixed in with the rejected and your month-end is missing crucial data. 

That’s why with Pleo, expenses are separated into different queues depending on their review status. When a Pleo user makes a purchase, it goes straight into the Expenses tab where your finance team has a real-time overview of all transactions. 

All of these expenses will be visible as Unexported expenses and can be edited, verified or amended. Missing receipts can be flagged, more information can be requested and the expense can be approved or rejected.

Once the expense has been fully approved and edited, it moves into the Export queue. All transactions can be reviewed one last time to make sure the data is correct, and if it doesn’t look right, it can be removed and re-done.

When everything is ready to go, the Exported queue shows all expenses that have been sent to the accounting system. 

By automating the bulk of the process and separating the expenses by unexported and exported, your finance team can get a better sense of what’s already been done and what’s left to do. 

Improved time management, better data, tighter controls and increased visibility are all a result of keeping your expenses organised. 

Need to re-export? No problemo. 

Re-exporting expenses can sometimes be a necessity. Maybe you deleted a bunch of expenses from your accounting system by mistake and need to export them again. Whatever the reason, you can re-export them through Pleo by selecting the desired expenses, and simply clicking export again. Zero hassle and zero stress. 

Being able to seamlessly integrate your expenses with your accounting system means no more tedious manual reporting. And much more time saved. 

Automating the time-consuming tasks frees up your finance team for more important things and allows the business to focus on what really matters. 

For best practices when using the Export feature, head over to our Help Centre.