Mastering spend management: Get full control over your company spend with Pleo

Whether you’re already a Pleo customer, a complete newbie or are simply curious about how Pleo can help your business, this is your one-stop shop for everything you need to know. 

We’ve compiled a (non-exhaustive) list of Pleo’s main components. Ready to get into it? Let’s go.

What is Pleo?

In case you haven’t been introduced yet, Pleo is an all-in-one spend management solution that gives you full visibility and control over your company spend. Say goodbye to paper receipts, manual expense reporting, skewed month-end reports and inaccurate data.

Pleo can be the first step for finance teams towards digital transformation and automation. 

And while digitising your expense reporting process might seem like a massive undertaking, with Pleo you can be set up and ready to go in as little as one to two days. 

Pleo can help your finance team stay on top of company spend by not only getting rid of manual expense reporting, but automating the tedious tasks, providing one platform to manage and control purchases, and optimising team and budget management. 

And there are plenty of features and functions customisable by you, including:

• The centralised Pleo Wallet 
• Real-time expense overview 
• People and team management
• Invoice management 
• Vendor cards 
• Seamless integrations with accounting systems 

…to name a few. 👀

1. The centralised Pleo Wallet 

Everyone needs a wallet to keep their cards and funds organised. And companies are certainly no exception.

The Pleo Wallet  puts the control back into the finance team's hands by centralising all available company funds in one place. This means that spenders’ cards are connected to a centralised pot rather than holding a certain amount of company money in individual cards. 

To add money to the Wallet, you need to connect your business bank account with your company’s Pleo profile. Transferring money is easy and safe: our partnership with JP Morgan and Danske Bank ensures that your company funds are protected in a third-party account. 

And with sophisticated spend controls, each card can have a set limit which will dictate how much money an employee has access to in the Wallet. 

Automatic top-ups

And to make things even better, there’s automatic top-ups.  To avoid the panic of declined purchases, auto top-up allows you to customise how much money gets automatically transferred to your Wallet once it falls below a specific amount. 

And if that’s not your cup of tea, manually topping up is just as easy.

2. Real-time expense overview 

Manual admin is the bane of any finance team's existence. But month-end doesn’t have to involve piles of receipts to sift through. 

Using Pleo for expense management gives finance teams a real-time overview of company spend. When employees make a purchase on their Pleo cards, they’re prompted to add a photo of the receipt straight away to the mobile or web app, which is then immediately available for review. And voilà! Expense done and dusted.

Show me the benefits

And that’s not all: with Pleo Expenses, finance teams have the freedom to:

• Centralise expense control 
• Review expenses in bulk or one at a time 
• Ask for more information through the app
• Know exactly which transactions are missing receipts 
• Know who spent what, where and why 

And since we partner with Mastercard, the expense information is pulled directly from the transaction terminal. Which means less reporting for your employees and more accurate information for finance. A win-win.

3. Streamline people and team expenses

With Pleo’s People overview, the admin can have a holistic overview of everyone spending in the business. Being able to manage everyone’s limits, keep track of team budgets and ease the reconciliation burden means more time for admins to spend on the important stuff. 

With Pleo budgets, admins can create different categories for certain teams or projects. Maybe there’s a team off-site or company event coming up and finance wants to be able to track how much is being spent. 

Setting a budget with Pleo helps to limit how much can be spent on a certain project, so finance knows that money won’t be overspent. We’ll even notify you when you’ve hit 75% of the budget, and again at 100% to make sure you’re sticking within your financial plan.

Different ways to pay

Depending on the Plan you go for, there are different types of cards and options for controlling how people can spend: 

• Virtual cards: For online spend or one-off purchases
• Physical cards: For all in-person purchases or petty cash spend
• Apple and Google pay: Leave your wallet at the office and pay with your phone 

Easier reimbursements

And it doesn’t end with allowing employees to make purchases on their own cards: they can also reimburse themselves for out-of-pocket expenses directly through the app.

With Pleo, all employees need to do is add their personal bank information to their Pleo profile. Then, once the purchase is approved by an admin, they can reimburse themselves. 

Multi-entity management 

Many companies have multiple subsidiaries and managing expenses across markets can be a massive drain on finance. 

Creating teams or setting up multi-entity management with Pleo to keep track of people across the border makes it easy to manage employees in different countries. 

 4. Process, pay and bookkeep your invoices

All businesses know how important it is to stay on good terms with suppliers. 

Late payments and mixed up dates can have a massive impact on business-supplier relationships. Which means that ensuring timely invoices is not only important, but a necessity for any finance team. 

Not to mention, a large invoice payment coming out of the blue can have a big effect on cash flow.

The majority of companies report that invoices make up more than 50% of all spending. And for half of all finance teams, they account for 75% or more of all outgoings. Pleo Invoices takes care of this crucial part of a business’s spending process by allowing invoices to be uploaded, reviewed, approved, paid or rejected all in one place. 

Easy uploading

You only need a few bits of information to upload an invoice: 

• Name of the supplier 
• Currency and amount to be paid 
• Your company name 
• A brief description of the payment to be made 

The invoice can then be uploaded manually or by email.

Better approval flows

Improved efficiency is just the beginning with Pleo Invoices. Having the right eyes in the right places (at the right time) is vital for keeping company funds safe. With Pleo, you can assign specific  reviewers to look over expenses and invoices.

Pay now or later

With Pleo, invoices can be scheduled for a later date or paid in bulk, giving admins the freedom to deal with the payments in their own time, and best suited to cash flow.

5. Easily manage recurring payments

Having a clear separation between employee expenses, like mileage or flight tickets, and recurring payments, such as Mailchimp or Amazon subscriptions, can mean all the difference when reconciling monthly business spend. 

With Pleo Vendor cards, the finance team can have tighter control over all frequent payments by assigning a specific Vendor card to one person who will be in charge of that payment. 

Vendor cards can be used for fixed monthly or yearly subscriptions, or even for varying amounts paid to the same vendor. The choice is yours! 

And that’s not all. If an employee in charge of a certain Vendor card leaves, the admin simply needs to reassign the owner. No need to cancel cards when someone leaves. 

6. Seamless integrations with accounting software

The final hurdle when it comes to spend management: reconciling expenses in the accounting system. 

You’ve captured receipts, reported expenses, approved and rejected invoices, categorised by project, team or budget… Now it’s time for accounting to finish the job. 

Organised exporting

With Pleo’s Export feature, you have two options for exporting: 

• One at a time: Go through each expense individually for a more thorough view.
• Bulk edit: Speed up the process by filtering for more regular transactions and updating them simultaneously.

And you can keep things more organised with different queues:

• Unexported: Flag missing receipts, request more information and approve or reject the expense 
• Export: Once approved, review everything one last time to make sure everything looks right 
• Exported: See what’s been sent to the accounting system already so you never lose track of what’s been approved 

If something gets deleted by mistake, you can always re-export your expenses. 

Getting rid of the tedious manual reporting is the tip of the iceberg: automating the export process frees up the finance team for more important things. 

Ready to streamline your spend management from start to finish? Speak to us or head over to the Help Centre to learn more.