Your step-by-step guide to moving your marketing spend to Pleo
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Sure, corporate card programs pay for the stuff your teams need to get the job done. But managing them can be a real headache for finance teams.
Switching your marketing and ad spend from traditional corporate cards to a modern spend management solution like Pleo can make your life much easier by streamlining financial operations, improving expense tracking and boosting efficiency.
Here, we’ll walk you through the steps to ensure a smooth transition.
Step 1: Assess your current system
Start by gathering all the details about your current setup. Look at how many cards you’re using at the moment, what types of expenses you have, how often transactions occur and who is in charge of each spending category.
Review your past credit card statements or financial records to spot vendors with recurring payments. And make sure to document who is responsible for each subscription – especially if multiple employees use a single card. This information will help you determine how many cards you'll need and set appropriate spending limits for each one.
Step 2: Plan how you’ll transition your spending
Create a ‘transition team’
Pull together a team dedicated to transitioning your marketing spend, including members from finance and other relevant departments to oversee the move. You might want to start with a specific department or budget holder (for instance, Bonzer began with their marketing department).
Set a timeline for the transition
Be sure to plan for overlap periods, where both the old and new systems are used simultaneously. Keep all relevant stakeholders informed about the upcoming change so that everyone’s on the same page. Change is easier when everyone knows what to expect and why, so explain the reasons for the transition and highlight the benefits everyone will soon enjoy.
Step 3: Set up Pleo to manage your marketing spend
Vendor cards
Set up vendor cards for handling your ads, events, online tools and other digital services. You can either have one card per vendor (like Meta) or one card for multiple vendors related to the same tactic (such as Meta, LinkedIn and Google for performance marketing). As long as you're on Pleo’s Advanced Plan, you can create as many cards as you need!
Next, set up spending limits and assign spend owners. To simplify recurring expenses, you can set a default category, tag and team for each virtual vendor card. This way, every expense made will be automatically categorised to save your finance team time. You can also attach receipts to make end-of-month reconciliation a breeze. On the activity feed, you’ll be able to see a full audit trail of each card's history, making tracking easier than ever.
Ulrich, CEO and Founder of Bonzer, and Johannes, CFO at Bonzer, immediately saw the benefit of using vendor cards to manage the business’s marketing spend. Now they have a single source of truth of how much has been paid towards marketing within a given month. It also gives Ulrich complete autonomy when managing the budget with one single card dedicated to marketing.
Sub-wallets
With sub-wallets , you can set up separate wallets for specific purposes. For example, you could create a sub-wallet just for advertising, ensuring that this budget is only used for ads. You can even link vendor-specific virtual cards or employee virtual/physical cards to these sub-wallets.
With individual sub-wallets organised by team or spending category (like ads, subscriptions, events, field marketing etc.), Pleo makes it easy for your finance team to track budget usage at a detailed level. So you can make quick adjustments as and when you need to, and manage your cash flow better.
Invoices
With Pleo, managing your company's marketing invoices is a walk in the park. Just email or upload your invoices to our dedicated invoice Inbox, and we'll process them automatically, capturing all the details you need in seconds.
You can view each invoice on your dashboard, where you can approve, schedule or reject them.
Plus, you can pay your suppliers using Pleo by scheduling invoice payments and choosing when and how to pay – in 15 days, 30 days or on the due date. Pleo also syncs every invoice and payment with your accounting software to save you the hassle.
“No more chasing invoices here, there and everywhere.” - Victoria Cozens, Co-Founder at Perky Blenders
Step 4: Train your team
Hold training sessions on the new spend management system for everyone involved, including spend owners, budget holders and managers. Make these sessions fun and interactive to ensure everyone feels comfortable with the changes.
Set up a support system so users can ask questions and get help whenever they need it during the transition. This way, everyone can feel confident and supported as they adapt to the new system, leaving no man behind.
Once your team is up to speed, you’re free to roll Pleo out across the rest of the business!
