Spendesk has been life changing for Finance. I can easily control and understand what’s spent.

See how Moneybox scaled up its finance processes with Spendesk

Moneybox was launched in 2016 with a mission to help people save and invest for their future with a few simple tools. After recently completing their Series C, Moneybox found themselves rapidly growing, yet struggling to catch their finance processes up to speed. Spendesk was key to scaling up and optimizing their spend management tools and systems.

Spending before Spendesk

When you work in an early stage company, all you hear in the finance team is “who’s got the company card?” So we were endlessly passing around this company card, which is definitely not the best or the safest way to be doing things.

Employees were responsible for coming back with a receipt or invoice for every purchase made. The challenge was that once the employees returned the cards, we had to make sure that the purchase made had been approved. And when they made unexpected ones, we couldn’t know that until they returned the card.

When the company cards were returned we’d also ask team members for their receipts. Obviously they didn’t have them, because no one outside of finance really cares about the receipt.

So when I spoke to Spendesk for the first time, the first thing I did was ask about receipts. And I was delighted to learn that, instead of having the finance team being the baddies chasing people down, the system does it for you automatically.

It has been life changing for Finance. You don’t have to spend your Fridays chasing people around the office to get the receipts.

Evolving with Spendesk

I think that we were lucky to sign up when we were only 35 staff. If we had signed up now - approaching 200 - we would have already needed a procurement team in place.

I can only imagine how painful it would have been to try and manage expenses and employee spending.

I don’t really know how we would have scaled up without Spendesk - maybe traditional corporate cards. But they don’t have that ability where you can workflow things out. We can allocate funds to individuals, where they can spend X amount without any authorisation required.

The finance team doesn’t have much interaction in the daily spend, and it’s still within the parameters of acceptable spending. I can easily control and understand what’s being spent.

Obviously there is a bit of a trust we give to employees, but it lets them buy anything they need.  And if they want to spend more than the authorised amount, it automatically notifies their managers. That’s great because previously the finance team had to authorise every pound. 

Paying online with Spendesk

What I also really like is the single-use virtual cards. If you’re making a one-off purchase, for a fixed value, you create a card just for that purchase. So you know that your exposure is just for that amount of money. 

If you give somebody a company card, it can get stolen, taken, used - Anything can happen to it, especially with the contactless, tap and spend system. But this can’t happen with the single-use Spendesk card.

And the recurring subscription cards are great too. Sometimes there’s a bit of a delay before we get invoices. But the subscriptions tools let us know how much cash we need at any point in the future, which is very useful. 

And we can also track duplicate subscriptions. You might already have a pro subscription to a service, but people have the habit of opening new accounts. Spendesk helps you capture these as soon as the person has opened the new account, and you can cancel them immediately.

Why would you recommend Spendesk?

We don’t only save time, but also money. When an expense is done, if you don’t have the receipt, you can’t get the tax back. So from that perspective you’re automatically saving money straight away, just by collecting receipts.

The authorisation workflows make so much sense and makes things easier. When you can allocate managers allowances for each of their employees, it takes the onus away from finance teams and puts it back onto the individual teams. It gives them the responsibility. 

You could try to run a kind of similar system without Spendesk, with corporate cards. But the control on those isn’t as efficient, and getting the receipts back is always hard.

If we tried to manage the amount of spends that we put through Spendesk for all subscriptions, we’d probably need somebody just for procurement and payment management. Rather than having someone dedicated to spend management, we have Spendesk instead, and it records and processes all of those documents automatically for us.

Spendesk during a crisis

Obviously things have changed over the last few months in the way that we act, and in how the finance team works with remote employees.

One of the things that was quite useful was the reimbursement of employee expenses directly from Spendesk. When a new employee starts with Moneybox, they set up their Spendesk account. Then they can buy whatever makes them feel comfortable enough to work remotely, and they can get reimbursed easily by simply uploading the receipt. 

Previously, we had to get the receipts, check if they met the right terms and conditions, and then start the reimbursement process. For 200 employees with on average three receipts each, that would have been a bit of a nightmare. But with Spendesk, everything is done in three clicks and everyone gets paid. It’s clearly a game changer.