Make Life Easier With Digital Expenses

I have worked for many companies over the years, where the expense and credit card procedure has been a painful and time-consuming task for employees, the directors and the finance team.

To be honest, in some companies it has almost felt like pulling teeth.

If you’ve worked for small companies you may not know what I’m talking about however, I’m sure some of you are working in larger companies where it is a monthly pain in the butt.

This can be a very manual process for everyone, and can involve lots of receipts (which have a nasty habit of disappearing).  For the finance team there is the pain staking task of ticking off the receipts against a paper expense/credit card claim.

It can work for a handful of claims, but when it gets to 30 to 60 claims a month, it becomes a mission.

Some of the knock-on effects of a manual process like this include:

• Expenses not getting on to the accounting system in a timely manner, making it difficult to track the expenses on jobs.
• Delays in billing the client for those expenses.
• These delays impact cash flow.
• An inefficient use of time for both the employees and finance.

One of my clients moved on to Pleo (a digital cash card) in February last year, and this has made me understand how digital expenses can be a real game changer. It has made such a difference, so I thought I’d share some of the joy…

Let me paint the picture of life for them before Pleo.

1. They used Barclaycard Commercial Credit Cards, and had over 25 users.
2. They had to wait 30 days to get the downloadable credit card statement.
3. They had to wait for over 20 people to add job numbers, expense codes and digital images to each credit card claim in the accounting system.
4. This generally took another month.
5. The accounts team then had to check each credit card claim which was on the accounting system, line by line, and image by image, checking it back to the physical credit card statement
6. At this point the receipts were uploaded to the accounting system.
7. As a result, expense sales invoices took over two months to generate,
8. This meant that the company was spending money on client expenses and only generating the invoice for those expenses two months later. Clients generally took between 30 to 60 days to pay. A cash flow nightmare!!

All of the above points were massive pain points for the employees and for the company as a whole. They had been doing things like this for many years.  Why?

Because….. “Things never change here.”

Let me paint the picture of what it is like now:

1. Each Pleo card user can update a digital image of the receipt, the job number and the expense code on an App on their phone.  This can be done at the time of making a transaction/purchase.   This saves each person at least 15/20 minutes a month.
2. All of the information and the receipt images are all in one place in Pleo, making checking the transaction details against the receipts easy. This saves the finance team approximately half a day/a full day a week,
3. The finance team can then download the transactions from Pleo into the main accounting system (and even go through an approval process) every week.
4. Expense Sales invoices can be raised in the same month.
5. Cash flow is looking better as a result.

As you can see this is all good. That is why I’m feeling so excited. This has made a huge difference for everyone involved.

So, if personal expenses and credit card claims are getting you down, I would suggest you look into switching to a digital platform (like Pleo). It could really make your life easier and save you both time and money.