How Pleo and TravelPerk help Luno manage business travel seamlessly

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Luno is a global cryptocurrency investment company whose mission is to put the power of cryptocurrency in everyone's hands. With over 11 million customers in 43 countries, a team of 1,000+ and offices in 9 countries, that’s a lot of expenses to manage.

Luckily for Luno, Pleo and TravelPerk – the all-in-one travel platform – have teamed up to make travel spending a breeze. How? Just make a booking on TravelPerk using your Pleo card, and we’ll take care of the rest. We match the receipt to the expense to make things easier when it comes to bookkeeping. No reporting, no manual reconciliation, no being out-of-pocket. It really is plain sailing.

We spoke to Byron Cowie, Head of Reporting and Control at Luno, to learn how the magic combination of Pleo and TravelPerk has removed the headache of business trips for their finance team.

Challenges

  • Missing receipts and missing owners for receipts
  • A period of time where one company card was shared between the whole office
  • Frequent travel meant a lot of manual expense reconciliation

Results

  • Managing the expenses for the 228 trips Luno made was easier than ever
  • Processing 400 expenses a month takes much less time
  • The finance team saves a day each month doing manual admin

Tell us about how you handled expenses before Pleo?

“My team takes care of the accounting and control and all those sorts of traditional things in a fairly untraditional business. There were only four people in the finance team when I joined, but now the team is made up of 40 people! Considering how much the company as a whole has scaled, there’s a lot of travel and a lot of expenses to process manually,” says Byron.

They came across Pleo when they launched their UK office and had that all-too-common frustrating experience where one credit card was shared between everyone – unbeknownst to the finance team!

“There were missing receipts, and missing owners for receipts – two issues we don’t have anymore. Now we can see who’s spent what and where, and nudge them for the receipt through the app.” No more awkwardly pestering your colleagues at the coffee machine.

“I'm a huge fan of Pleo. It's really made our lives much easier. I don't say that about a lot of software we use!”

How are you using Pleo across the company?

“We’ve only given a card to people who spend or travel frequently. We’re rolling out Pleo Pocket for everyone else to help speed up the reimbursement process,” Byron tells us. Before this, it could take up to a month to reimburse employees. That’s bad news for both the finance team and employees who are left out-of-pocket.

“We’re a global company, with hundreds of bank accounts and corporate accounts across multiple markets. This means manually uploading hundreds of bank statements into our accounting system is a very friction-filled process.” Before Pleo, the team at Luno was manually downloading CSVs and uploading them to Sage X3 to reconcile them 🥱 Now, they’ve built an integration using Pleo’s open API .

“It might not sound all that much, but with a small finance team that has a lot of complex crypto recons to do, we really don’t want to spend time processing credit card transactions.” For Luno , time would be better spent looking after customer funds. So saving someone a whole day’s work makes a huge difference.

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