The top 4 benefits of Payhawk business payments and expenses

If you or your finance team are still spending the last week of every month chasing your colleagues, you need to know there's a better way. At Payhawk, our software and company cards mean that it's easy for your colleagues to make payments and submit the details. And, even easier for your finance managers to manage business expenses against budget, pull reports, and use clear data to support forecasting and planning.

There are hundreds of reasons why your businesses should use Payhawk. But here are the top four as chosen by our customers:

1. Saving time

At Payhawk, we saw the issues faced by finance teams and their colleagues regarding making payments and expense management. Our product connects globally accepted company cards with OCR extraction software that lets employees upload their expenses at the touch of a button.

We also combine expense management and reporting software that helps finance teams set policy, see who's spending what and where, and create insightful reports to help optimize budget and spend. That means no more chasing paper receipts and no more missing puzzle pieces through lack of finance software integration.

With Payhawk, you can set your payments on auto-pilot too. We provide dedicated IBANs, which allow free SEPA Instant and Faster Payments transfers. These transfers are fully-integrated with your vendor management process and enable you to pay your external suppliers. For your internal transfers or reimbursements, you can pay directly through Payhawk — even to employees who don't have access to a company card. You can reimburse them directly to their personal bank account in just one click.

What does that all look like in real terms? Here are some numbers sourced by our customer success team:

• Five days faster monthly closing
• 87% of the financial process is automated
• 95% of data entry removed
• 24 hours of work spared each month

Plus, external data shows that companies with electronic expense reporting save an average of 58% on processing costs.

"The landscape of finance solutions is enormous. Most focus on a single area, e.g. expensing, payments, or invoice management, and are totally disconnected from each other. With Payhawk, we have an all-in-one solution that covers all areas. As a result, we can focus on what really matters to us as a fast-growing startup instead of wasting time on admin," Giancarlo Bruni, CFO at Heroes, explained.

2. Saving money

There are numerous ways to work out the ways Payhawk saves businesses money. Yes, the hours saved for each person involved went into something more productive for the company. But there are other easier to quantify ways, too, including:

• No currency fees to spend in GBP and EUR
• A market-leading 1.99% FX rate on all other currencies (compared to Barclays for example, at 2.99% for a non-Sterling transaction fee)
• 3% cashback* on all POS spend, capped at your subscription
• Our low fee and pricing model
• A typical saving of €8,417 per month for scale-ups and €20,792 for Enterprises

“It’s super beneficial to use Payhawk instead of personal cards, as the exchange rates are horrific,” Iliyana Krushkova, CFO of ScaleFocus, told us.

Cashback is available for new customers on yearly plans. The cashback is limited to the amount of your monthly base fee. See our terms and conditions for more details.

3. Transparent spending

Our solution helps your finance team get to grips with company spend in two major ways. Number one, they can see each payment being made, by who, where, and for what in the tool. This real-time functionality allows finance managers to see live cash flow data to make quick decisions, adjust budgets, and support teams who need more allocation. Number two, they can pull reports in seconds to help close the month, the quarter, and the year.

Both types of reports offer invaluable insights into the way the business spends. Meaning, finance managers and team leaders can forecast more easily, plan effectively, and build and optimize budgets.

"Everything is documented, the amount, why, which category. Payhawk is helping us to control our expenses and also control the process and have accountability at each and every step." Olivier Lamoral, VP of Sales at Luxair, said.

4. Compliance

Policies and compliance can be really disjointed for businesses that use traditional payment and expense models. If an employee pays with a personal card they have a few jobs to complete.

First, an employee must ensure they have enough personal funds to pay for the company purchase; then, they must keep the paper receipt safely to submit their expenses later. Once they've followed their organization's process to submit the receipt, they must wait for the reimbursement. All the time, being careful of what they spend until they receive the funds back in their account. This whole process has several complications for both the employee and the finance team, including:

• Lack of personal funds to purchase in the first place
• Lost receipts
• Non-integrated, time-consuming approvals
• Lack of employee empowerment
• Overspend or out-of-policy spend

The last one, in particular, is a big compliance issue. If a company has drafted a spend policy for its employees (as part of a traditional business payments expense model,) then where is it? Is it saved in a drive that the employee can access while paying on the go? Is it printed out and stuck on the wall in the office?

Everything's connected with our company cards, so it's easy to stay compliant with policy. Your colleagues can spend as and when they need as the spend policy is woven into the expense tool that's connected to the company card.

If your colleagues need to spend more than the set limit, they can make a fund request at the touch of a button which the supervisor can approve or deny in an instant. No worries if you have several teams and layers of approvals, we’ve got you covered with our approval workflows.

"We can see every transaction in real-time. And, it's even more helpful as we know which department made it, and everything is accessible for both the cardholder and finance team. We like that we can track spending and set limits on a department level while automating the approval process," Paul Schwarzenholz, Co-founder at Zenloop, said.

Learn how Payhawk could transform payment and expense management in your business. Book a demo today.