How Pleo’s spend controls can help you create business spending symphony

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From software to healthcare, people always need to buy stuff for work. It’s inevitable. Office managers need to keep the staff room fully stocked, sales teams need to buy train tickets for client meetings, marketing teams need to add funds to the company’s Meta account for the next campaign… you get the idea.

But for many companies, keeping an eye on these costs can quickly become challenging. The more people spending, the quicker your finances can fall out of sync.

Let’s say you’re a software company. You might need to outsource web developers for a new project you’ve taken on, pay for software licence fees and transport for team members installing products at client offices. With so much going on, it can be tricky to keep track of who’s spending what – and where. Your finances can fall a little flat when it feels like everyone’s dancing to a different beat.

Rather than feeling out of control, how about relying on a system you can customise for your business, that gives you spending guardrails, efficient workflows and a detailed view of every single expense as they happen?

Full flexibility, complete control 💪

That’s what Pleo’s handy range of spend control tools offers finance teams. These controls empower you to hit your objectives while adhering to rules and regulations, keeping your business in check and your spending in tune.

Let’s take a look at how these could work for different company set-ups.

Whether you just opt for one control tool or the whole bunch, you’ll have oversight of who’s spending what and when, and you can trust that your budget won’t budge.

Want to manage your team’s spending more efficiently?

All companies have times when they want to spend more efficiently or need to be more cautious about their spending. Maybe you’re keeping a closer eye on things because your company is in a crucial growth stage, or maybe the economy is causing you to think twice before you spend.

No matter the cause, we have the tools to help you efficiently manage your spending. We’ve created flexible permissions within our product to prevent undesirable spend at your company. Why not start by setting up some of our spending limits?

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You can choose to set up a monthly or total card limit. For example, maybe you want to cap your team’s spending at £500 a month. You can also choose not to set a card limit, if you like. And there’s the option to set a limit per purchase, meaning if you capped a user’s spending at £200 per transaction, any purchase over this amount would automatically be declined.

Our solution also offers temporary spending limits. Admins can make temporary changes to a user’s spending limit for a certain period of time only. This is handy when employees need to buy something out of the ordinary.

Let’s say a member of your sales team needs to go on a business trip, but the flight ticket and hotel booking exceed their normal spending limit. All your company’s admin needs to do is set an increased temporary spending limit, allowing the employee to spend more than they would normally be able to. After the business trip, their spending limit will automatically return to what it was before.

“Spending limits are a great way of making sure we’re not overspending. With this control feature, we’re able to ask more questions about the purchase and see if it’s necessary.” - Frederik Kirkeby Beth, Head of Operations at True Gum

Want to limit cash spending and take control of your cash flow? 

That’s why there’s Advanced Card Controls. They’re a great feature that takes a bit of an extra step in stopping employees from spending more than they should – or when they shouldn’t.

For instance, Advanced Card Controls allow you block ATM withdrawals. If you don’t want employees taking out cash with their company cards as it can make keeping track of spending trickier, no problem. Just disable this feature to give you more control over how your employees use their Pleo cards.

You can also set which days your employees can use their Pleo cards. With weekday blocks, you can have it so Pleo cards only work on selected days of the week. You’ll never have to worry about anyone using their Pleo card on weekends if they aren’t meant to.

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And if employees aren’t quite sure why their purchase was declined on a Sunday afternoon, they can always refer to the Spend Guidelines. This feature allows finance teams to document up-to-date guidance on what and how employees can spend within a certain context. This means that everyone is educated on what they can buy and keeps spending within policy. 

Not only that – you can also avoid the issue of critical transactions getting declined because too much money is coming out of the main wallet. With Sub-Wallets, you can ring-fence your business-critical funds for specific purposes.

Sub-Wallets let you allocate cash into dedicated pots where the funds can only be used for certain expenses. This way, you can take control of your cash flow, and you avoid missing critical payments that could impact your key operations – simple, but effective.

Want extra control over spending, reviewing and approval? 

With Pleo, no expense falls through the cracks.

One way to stay in control is by setting thresholds. These allow you to customise expense approvals based on the amount. For example, you might want your CFO to approve expenses only if they’re over the £500 mark. Anything below this amount can go to the Finance Manager.

And you’ll love our multi-step approval process. Setting up Team Review allows you to assign a reviewer to approve a team member’s expenses. For example, you might ask the People Director to be in charge of approving the HR team’s receipts. 

Company Review, on the other hand, is a review step for the finance team (aka Admins or Bookkeepers) to approve company-wide expenses. Together, these work to give you that extra pair of eyes and another layer of visibility.

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You can even assign an extra pair of eyes to invoices and choose from a range of scheduling options. With Pleo, you can schedule your invoice payments to be paid in either 15, 30 or 60 days, or on the due date. This allows you to take ownership of your cash flow. Plus, we’ll automatically detect any duplicate invoices to prevent you from paying the same bill twice.

As if that wasn’t enough, Tag Review lets you set up reviewers for expenses based on tags.  Spoiler alert: Project Managers will be delighted with this feature. Essentially, it notifies reviewers to approve spend allocated to a tag (aka cost centers). Since projects are often set up using tags, this makes it possible to review spend against those tags – boosting visibility even more.

And finally, the icing on the cake: Sequential Review. Gone are the days when the finance team received expenses for review before Team or Tag Reviewers had a chance to approve them. With Sequential Review, you can set up a step-by-step approval chain flow. This makes the approval process much smoother, letting finance step in only after Team or Tag Reviewers have approved the expense. It cuts down on early checks, saving you from wasted time and effort.

Want to prevent Pleo cards falling into the wrong hands?

Easy – we’ve built a range of corrective controls to fix errors or irregularities and mitigate any financial risks in your business.

First up is card freezing. Whether your employees have a physical or virtual card (or both), you can freeze them in seconds to stop further spending. This is particularly handy if you suspect fraud on an account or you’ve noticed any suspicious activity.

Has someone left the company? You can revoke access to their Pleo card with just a few clicks in the app. 

Want to skip the manual steps? No sweat. Connect your Pleo account to your HRIS tool to automatically deactivate access to Pleo when employees leave – it’s that easy to get complete peace of mind.

Want complete transparency and visibility of your expenses? 

We know how important it is to have a transparent, holistic view of company spending at all times. After all, you can’t control what you can’t see – the more visibility, the better control you have of your spending. So we’ve designed a few features to give you that extra element of expense reviewing.

First up, Spend Analytics. From visual charts to reporting and dashboards, this feature gives you everything you need to get full visibility of your spending in real-time. This is a game changer for finance. It allows them to quickly spot things like duplicate subscription payments or overspending on specific categories, making it much easier to optimise costs and make smarter spending decisions.

And let’s not forget about Budgets. This feature allows admins to track spending across all payment and expense types, from cards and reimbursements to invoices. Your budget owners and finance teams can see exactly how projects or departments are tracking against their allocated budgets – again, in real-time.

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Then there are Audit Trails. These are a record of every transaction – who spent what, who approved it, what actions were taken and when it all happened. Audit Trails provide a built-in log of company spending that keeps everything transparent and organised. This makes it easy to see when to improve spending habits and processes – and when to be audit-ready for internal checks and compliance.

We mentioned categories earlier; another feature that’s handy when it comes to visibility. 

When someone pays for something with their Pleo card, our solution automatically assigns it to a category based on the merchant. This could be entertainment, travel, or meals and drinks, for instance. This gives the finance team the context that explains why a purchase was made, but  also helps them ​​spot if certain teams are spending over budget, or if a particular employee e.g. keeps spending out of policy when travelling.

Need even more detail? Admins and bookkeepers can set up Tags to help them track all sorts of financial dimensions related to business spending. These can be implemented from Xero or Netsuite, or set up from scratch in Pleo – it’s up to you. A tag could explain which project a purchase is related to, which team has bought something, or even which client it’s connected to.

We covered Tag Review earlier too – so what about Budgets? These allow admins to create a budget using a personalised Tag, helping to better visualise and keep track of spending in real-time. 

Imagine you’re a construction company dealing with lots of different clients. Set up a Tag for each client name to automatically assign spend associated with that Tag to your budget. You’ll be notified when you’ve spent over 75% and 100% of that budget to help you stay on top of things. 

“We love that you can have different settings for different people in the business. We can give our operations team more access and higher spending limits, while the rest of the business has strict approval flows.” - Harry Woods, Financial Controller at BeZero Carbon

If you’re struggling to get a grip on where your company’s money is going, these spend controls are for you. Personalise them to suit your set-up and see how it feels to have your finance team and employees working (and spending) in harmony. Dig deeper into Pleo’s range of spend controls and watch your business expenses fall back into the right rhythm.

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