Payhawk and Rillet: spend control before the ledger

Deciding whether a purchase is allowed and recording it accurately (and reliably) are two different jobs. The first happens before any money moves. The second happens after the money has already gone.

Payhawk and Rillet now connect natively, and the connection keeps those two jobs where they belong. Payhawk handles requests, approvals, policy, cards, payments, receipts and coding (giving everything auditable spend). Rillet handles the bookkeeping and master data.

The practical effect is that data arrives at the ledger already carrying its cost centre, entity, tax treatment, receipt and approval. Rillet's agents don't have to stop mid-close and go looking for any of it.

This guide explains how the split actually works, what data moves where, and why it makes close quicker.

What is Rillet?

Rillet is an AI-native enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, and its AURA AI handles the heavy lifting, including journal entries, reconciliation, revenue recognition, and reporting.

Rillet was founded with fast close in mind, so from one ledger, it’s designed to consolidate multiple entities and recognise revenue in real time. This approach saves finance teams from manual consolidation and a month-end close that gets slower every time you add an entity.

Finance teams choose the ERP that fits them. For teams that have chosen Rillet, Payhawk plugs in on the spend side.

How Payhawk and Rillet split the work

Payhawk owns everything before the spend is committed and everything as it moves: who was involved, what was decided, etc. This way, spend isn’t a black box. Rillet owns everything after. This includes getting it onto the books, closing them, and turning them into reports.

That split matters more than it sounds like it should. Automation is only as good as what it’s fed. If an AI agent is posting a transaction to the ledger, it needs the cost centre, entity, receipt, tax treatment, and approval already sitting there. It can’t stop mid-close to go and find them.

Payhawk's AI readiness report puts a number on it: among finance teams that rate themselves as AI leaders, only 26% have all five conditions for scaling AI in place at once. One of the weakest links is the data itself: just 61% have data AI can actually use. Rules and budget don't fix that; the data reaching the ledger has to be clean before it arrives.

To ensure your finance data is accurate, you need to do two things right:

1. Deciding whether a spend is allowed happens before the money moves.
2. Recording it accurately happens after.

Both matter, and both are done well by different systems: one built for control at the point of spend, one built for the ledger.

A ledger is only as fast as the data reaching it, and Payhawk’s job is to make sure it arrives ready.

What the Payhawk and Rillet integration does

The integration is two-way; some data flows from Rillet into Payhawk to keep coding accurate at source. But most flows from Payhawk into Rillet as spend happens.

Two things separate this from most spend-to-ERP connections in the market.

It’s two-way.

Most spend-to-ERP connections only work in one direction. That leaves finance to fix the drift by hand: someone updates a supplier in Payhawk, the ledger still has the old version, and slowly the two stop matching. Two-way sync gets rid of that job entirely, i.e. the one nobody budgets for but everyone ends up doing.

It’s real time too. No overnight export sitting waiting to be uploaded.

Transactions, supplier updates, and payments all flow through as they happen, so the ledger shows today. If you bought Rillet for a fast close, a batch job sitting upstream would quietly get in the way of that. It doesn’t matter how fast Rillet can close if the data’s stuck a step behind.

One thing to note: Payhawk sends expenses over as the actual object they are, not as raw journal entries. So a supplier invoice shows up as a supplier invoice in Rillet, not a generic posting someone has to re-tag.

This also means the trail doesn’t break, because you can trace all spend in Payhawk towards the ERP.

Six reasons to run Payhawk alongside Rillet

1. Two sets of agents, one clear division of labour

Payhawk’s AI agents cover procurement, travel, payments, and financial control. Together, they handle the request-to-payment chain (Payhawk’s workflow orchestration at work): pulling together the details, checking policy, routing approvals, and flagging anything unusual. Rillet’s agents pick things up from there, closing the books and reporting on them.

Handing work between the two doesn’t mean fewer controls. If anything, it’s the opposite: every step stays logged and traceable, which is what makes the handover trustworthy in the first place.

2. One spend platform across the US and Europe

This is the coverage Payhawk brings to the table. A group running entities across the US and Europe uses one spend layer rather than a different tool per region, with multi-currency, VAT, and EU eInvoicing handled at source rather than patched in afterwards. Payhawk is native to this with deep expertise across Europe and the UK.

3. Multi-entity and multi-currency control, before consolidation

Payhawk is built entity-first, preventing intercompany accounting at source. That means cost centre, entity, and currency are already attached before anything reaches Rillet. So there’s no mapping or guesswork needed after the fact. That’s what Payhawk’s multi-entity management actually delivers: data that’s ready to consolidate the moment it’s spent.

4. Cards, accounts, and payments in the same platform

Having all the ways money can leave the company in one place means you have a complete view of your spend: how it leaves and also offers this same simple entry point into spend for all your employees who need it. An ERP can’t do this.

Payhawk holds an EMI in the EEA and the UK, which means card spend is visible as quickly as invoice payments because the card feed is always current. The best ERP couldn’t cover it if the card feed trails.

5. Control before the spend, not coding after it

Requests, approvals, and budget checks all happen before a transaction exists to record, so nothing needs coding retroactively.

That’s the moment where out-of-policy spend actually gets stopped, not three weeks later when someone finally reviews it. This is the Payhawk philosophy of spend: proactive control.

6. One record, not two that drift apart

Suppliers and spend data sync both ways, in real time, so Payhawk and Rillet always agree. Nobody’s stuck cross-checking one against the other.

Most tools in this space work the other way: a one-way export on a schedule, a supplier list that slowly falls out of date, and a controller stuck reconciling the systems instead of the actual books.

What one governed chain looks like: request to ledger

The chain runs in seven steps:

1. The Procurement Agent structures and submits a purchase request from an employee
2. Payhawk’s AI fills in the missing details (such as merchant, category, and likely cost centre, so nobody’s typing from scratch)
3. Policy and budget are checked automatically against what’s already been committed elsewhere in the entity.
4. Approval routes by entity and amount (so a small local purchase and a six-figure group contract never sit in the same queue)
5. Spend controls then enforce the purpose that was actually approved, not just a spending cap
6. The receipt or invoice is automatically captured and coded with AI OCR technology at the point of purchase, rather than chased afterwards
7. And the coded, approved expense syncs to Rillet in real-time, with the original request still attached.

All this means the ledger entry carries its own history, rather than arriving as an anonymous line item.

The point of the whole sequence is what it removes from a controller’s week: finance reviews exceptions, not every transaction. That’s a different job to the one most teams are doing today. Where the default is checking everything and hoping the exceptions surface themselves.

What to ask a spend management vendor if you're running Rillet

If you're running Rillet and deciding where spend management sits, these are the questions that tell you what it means in each case.

• Is the Rillet connection native, or does it run through middleware, a CSV export, or a custom API build? And if it's built, who maintains it when either side ships a change?
• Which way does the data flow? Chart of accounts, tax codes, cost centres and entities should come from Rillet into the spend tool, so coding happens at source instead of being mapped by hand in two places.
• Does spend arrive in Rillet as native objects, so a supplier invoice lands as a supplier invoice and an expense report as an expense report? Or does it arrive as raw journal entries that someone has to re-tag?
• Real-time or batch? If a fast close is why you bought Rillet, an overnight export sitting upstream of the ledger gives some of that back.
• For a group, is it one connection or one per entity? Ask specifically what happens when you add an entity: a mapping that updates itself, or a new integration project.
• Does the receipt and approval trail travel with the transaction, so a posting in Rillet can be traced back to the original request without leaving the ledger?
• Are multi-currency, VAT and EU eInvoicing handled at the point of spend, or reconstructed later? This is the question that separates vendors who cover the US and Europe from vendors who cover one and adapt.

If a vendor answers the first three well, the rest usually follow.

What to do next

Book a demo, and we'll work through the questions above against your own entity structure and Rillet setup. You'll see how the handoff works in practice, and what happens to it when you add your next entity, currency or region.