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Travel & Expenses

7 ways a Pleo card can transform your business

The way you use your Pleo card is down to you.

Pleo is for everyone and we’ll always make sure you know about our sharpest new features and how they might help you handle business expenses.

But we love when customers adapt Pleo to their team’s needs.

And often, what they’ve done with their Pleo cards has surprised – and inspired – us.

So we set ourselves a challenge: lay out some of the awesome ways our cards are used, to help spark our customers to do even more with Pleo.

A bad-ass perk

Some of our customers hand new employees a Pleo card on their first day, making clear that it’s a cool perk of the job.

Join us, use this card to buy what you need.

It’s something we do, but we’re not alone. Our friends at Convivio even mention us in their job ads – thanks, guys!

With a Pleo card, the new hire feels trusted from day one. They’re spared from the awkwardness of trying to find out who can help them buy a new laptop.

But Pleo cards are a great benefit for existing employees too.

They share the message that everyone has the ability to make their own decisions about what’s worth spending money on.

Stop arguments over office expenses

You know what it was for me at a previous job? It was doughnuts.

That was the office expense we were supposed to share, in the name of team-bonding. But that wasn’t what happened because we were paying with our own cash.

“If only we’d had Pleo… Nobody out-of-pocket, everybody sharing a cool perk.”

That meant arguments about who last paid for the doughnuts, or why someone was buying the cheap doughnuts and not splashing out for the really good ones.

If only we’d had Pleo.

With sign-off from the boss on this delicious office expense, we could have used our cards to pay for the treats. Shared by everyone, bought on Pleo.

Nobody out-of-pocket, everybody sharing a cool perk.

It doesn’t have to be doughnuts of course. Pleo can also prevent simmering tensions about office expenses like plants, stationery or furniture.

(Finally) sort out your subscriptions

For too many companies, business subscriptions are out of control. And yes, we know, you’ve been meaning to get around to fixing them for a long time.

It’s so quick and easy to sign up for software subscriptions now, some workers rack up dozens of regular monthly bills.

It’s great that they’re doing their jobs more efficiently with these tools.

What’s not so hot is the mess that this can create with traditional expense management systems.

Hundreds of separate invoices every month, with expense reports required for each and every one?

That’s where Pleo cards come in, as a much more straightforward way to manage your subscriptions.

An employee’s sign-ups will all be clearly categorised on their individual account, so you can see exactly who’s using what tool.

And when employees add a new subscription, a notification means you can check in with them, if you’re not sure what it’s being used for.

It also means that when someone leaves, it couldn’t be simpler to end their subscription. Just freeze their Pleo card.

No more “ghost” subscriptions where a business is still paying for the software last used by Jimmy, who left in 2017.

Or was it 2016?

Teach your employees to be more awesome

Open wide, here comes the stat…. and it’s a big one.

94% of employees say they would stay with a company longer if it fostered their learning and development.

“Want to keep your employees invested? Pleo can help you do that.”

If you want to keep your employees, especially younger ones, onside and engaged with your business goals, you need to think about their future.

One practical way to invest in that is to offer them training and skills development, paid for on a Pleo card.

Our spending limits mean companies can set clear monthly or annual budgets that are allocated towards learning.

The worker can be empowered to sign up for the course themselves, using their own Pleo card to invest in their future.

We think that’s cool: It means they’re thinking about training as their own upskilling decision, rather than a box-ticking company mandate.

Pull a U-turn on business travel stress

Stop and think about how business travel works and you realise that in a lot of firms, it’s still handled the way it has been since the dawn of time.

The hard-working business traveller heads off for days, weeks, or months on end to do valuable work. Along the way, they rack up expenses.

They collect up their mountain of receipts, drop them on the accounting team and chaos ensues.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

With Pleo, bosses can see every expense from the second the business traveller starts to make their first bookings. They can see, in real-time, what costs are being accrued and where.

For the business traveller, the advantages might be even bigger.

No more paying out-of-pocket while on the road and a huge boost to how trusted you feel while putting in the hard yards.

Make freelancers and remote workers part of the team

There are 2m freelancers in the UK alone, a 43% increase over the past decade. For the vast majority of those, freelancing is their main source of income.

That’s a big change to the world of work.

“A Pleo card is a great way to make a freelancer or remote worker feel like a valued part of your team.”

Often, freelancers are not properly engaged with the companies that hire them.

A Pleo card is a great way to make them feel like a real, valued part of the team. The company can set a spending limit and see any expenses racked up.

When the job is done, it’s easy to freeze the card.

But in the meantime you’ve made life easier for the freelancer, who doesn’t need to worry about chasing people they don’t know for simple expenses.

Leave petty cash in the past (where it belongs)

We feel nostalgia for some strange things, don’t we?

Eurovision entries from the past. Bad 1980s films. That weird hairstyle you tried for three months in university.

But nobody feels nostalgic for petty cash once they move on from it.

The goal of petty cash is that nobody has to dip into their own pocket to buy things for work, but it’s an old-fashioned answer to that problem.

For one thing, petty cash can’t be traced.

People dip into it and unless somebody is tracking where every penny is spent, it’s likely that the sums might not add up at the end of the month.

And even if someone is tracking it all, that’s a lot of work just to make sure nobody bought an extra chocolate bar.

Pleo is a digital answer to the same problem, but doesn’t require a box full of cash to be kept in an office.

Did we miss anything?

Ok, so is there anything else that should be on our list?

What other cool things has your Pleo card helped you and your business to do?

With the exciting features we continue to bring online, we’re sure this list is going to keep growing.

Smarter spending for your business

Save time on tedious admin and make smarter business decisions for the future. Join Pleo today.

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