This year has been... challenging, to say the least. At the same time, teams and organisations around the world have shown tremendous resiliency, flexibility and the ability to be effective together while working apart.
Thanks to you, 2021 has been a year of records and bold new goals for us at Spendesk. Here are some of the achievements we want to celebrate with you and share our gratitude with you.
The 100 million EUR foundation for the next act
We raised 100 million EUR in our Series C funding and we are investing these funds in our people and our product. We grew the team by almost 50% and welcomed over 100 new team members to our offices in Paris, Berlin, London and San Francisco.
We’ve also brought countless remote workers into the Spendesk family. Spendesk embraces the new world of work - after all, you only need a laptop and an internet connection to do your best work.
Spendesk ranked N°1 Fintech in Europe
To build a company people are proud to work at was the driving inspiration when Rodolphe created Spendesk more than 5 years ago. And he definitely succeeded.
We were thrilled to learn that Spendesk was ranked by Glassdoor as the best European Fintech to work for in 2021. We celebrated this achievement at our Paris headquarters, as well as our 5th anniversary and the Series C investment. So much to celebrate!
The team has been hard at work shipping solutions to our customer’s most pressing problems. Here’s a brief look at some of the major advances of our platform.
Top 2021 capabilities to adopt now
1. Centralise the AP process with purchase orders & invoices
You can now track the entire accounts payable process from purchase order to payment process on one platform – and in real-time. This keeps finance teams in complete control, and helps keep teams accountable, efficient, and on budget.
2. Create budgets & sub-budgets in Spendesk
The budgets feature empowers every department and budget keeper to make timely and informed spending decisions. Say “hello” to easily accessible real-time overviews of what’s actually been spent.
You also have the ability to rapidly create budgets in Spendesk thanks to direct budget imports. You can also get more granular visibility by adding sub-budgets.
3. Upgrade to Bookkeep 2.0 – the improved Spendesk Infrastructure
Better comply with accrual accounting standards thanks to the new Spendesk infrastructure. You can now bookkeep payables regardless of their payment status. Finance teams will also be able to unlock new accounting features and benefit from future Spendesk capabilities.
4. Submit, track and approve mileage on mobile
Mileage can now be submitted, tracked and approved directly on the Spendes mobile app. Employees can submit round-trips and save vehicles and addresses they use regularly. On average, about 70% of all mileage requests submitted in the past three months are round trips, a record when it comes to feature adoption!
A recent survey of 1000+ finance professionals from France, Germany and the UK (2021 Spendesk benchmark) showed that (1) there are still many opportunities for digitisation, and (2) digitisation is the most impactful way for companies to reduce manual work and free time for more valuable tasks.
A sizeable opportunity lies with invoices:
- Over 70% of invoices are (still) approved manually
- More than 50% of all payments are paid through invoice
Spend on the Spendesk platform tripled in 2021
Year over year, we have seen an exponential increase in platform use on Spendesk with a total of over 4 billion EUR spent on Spendesk since we first launched the platform in 2016. In 2021, the spend on the platform tripled with more than 2.9 billion EUR total spend, a record!
Spendesk ranked G2 leader in spend & expense management
You have not been shy to review us on G2 this year. Thanks to your ratings, Spendesk was named a leader in the Spend Management and Expense Management category. We also won several G2 badges for “Best Usability”, “Best Est. ROI Small Businesses” as well as “Fastest Implementation Mid-Market” amongst others.
A big thank you, merci & danke for that!
7,400 finance leaders have joined CFO Connect
CFO Connect, the international community for finance leaders, now counts more than 7,400 members, growing by 50% this year.
The Community also hosted its first virtual CFOC Summit in September where 30+ finance experts from industry leaders like Vodafone, PwC, Wefox and Glovo shared their insights and best practices. If you weren’t among the 3000 registrants, you can watch the recorded sessions here!
The 7-in-1 platform: the key to every successful mission
Thousands of finance teams have accelerated their collaboration through the scalable Spendesk platform. We combine smart payments (cards, expenses & invoices) as well as key processes, including budgets, approvals, accounting automation and reporting.
To wrap things up, we wanted to give credit where credit is due and show finance teams as we see them: real-life champions and the secret heroes of the team!
2022: purple is the new black
And we won’t stop here. We are ready to paint the finance world purple. And speaking of “purple”: Pantone just announced the color of the year 2022. And guess what, it’s a shade of purple! A sign? We like to think so.
Rodolphe, co-founder and CEO of Spendesk says:
“Globally, there are several macroeconomic trends driving the growth adoption and growth of Spendesk. Digital transformation accelerated, globalisation of supply chains increased and workers demand flexible working environments, locations and hours. To better harness the demands of these changes, in 2022 we will roll out the next act of Spendesk. And I can tell you that after 5 years, I've never been more excited and happy to start.”
So we hope you are as excited and pumped for 2022 as we are!