Accelerating travel expense management at Porsche e-Bikes

Life before Payhawk

Famous for their timeless design and technical innovation, Porsche e-Bikes were looking for an expense management solution that could perform just as fast and seamlessly as they did.

Before moving to Payhawk, Porsche e-Bikes faced multiple spend management issues, including missing invoices, multiple people sharing one card, and limited control over spend.

"The biggest problem was business travel expenses," Gabriela Leovac, Accountant at Porsche e-Bikes, explains. "We didn't have a system that let employees submit their trip expenses easily. And we wanted to find a solution that allowed employees to use corporate cards, apply for a daily allowance, upload all of their travel and work expenses, and get fast approvals."

Discovering innovative business travel expense management

Since moving to Payhawk, the team at Porsche has found managing business travel expenses straightforward and insightful. Real-time spend visibility and expense control have helped them to find savings opportunities, optimise budgets, and make more informed decisions.

Take mileage, for example, and our easy-to-use customisable mileage feature. The team at Porsche e-Bikes can now automate much of the process and remove the effort of tracking confusing requests.

Employees simply enter their journey's start and end point, and we calculate the necessary business travel expense and reimbursement amount. The finance team can then check and reimburse in seconds, meaning no more out-of-pocket delays, or lags in visibility.

Per diems and our TravelPerk integration are crucial for companies with strong business travel cultures, too. From setting and updating country-specific per diems to our integration with TravelPerk, that supports transport and accommodation, we help make business travel a breeze for both travellers and the finance team.

Less paperwork, more transparency

The Porsche e-Bikes team knew they needed to remove a lot of the manual finance admin to accelerate their spend management processes and swerve errors.

Since moving to Payhawk, they have saved multiple hours a day thanks to our innovative features, including instant virtual card issuance, customisations including card controls and spend categories, OCR data capture for efficient bookkeeping, reconciliation-supporting accounting integrations, real-time spend visibility, and more.

"We now have more time to analyse the expenditure which, before Payhawk, was consumed by acquiring all the data from employees," Gabriela says. "Now we have more transparency, tighter control over all the expenses, and less paperwork."

Now that the team at Porsche has said goodbye to chasing receipts, they have tonnes more time to work on more important initiatives. At Payhawk, our OCR technology makes life easier for both cardholders and the finance team.

All the spender needs to do is take a photo of their receipt and select a spend category (as listed by the finance team in partnership with team leaders/ budget owners.) The OCR then pulls all relevant receipt data out, the solution buckets it according to the category, and all the information flows seamlessly into the connected accounting software or ERP. And if the cardholder forgets to upload the receipt? The app automates receipt chasing and even allows the finance team to auto-freeze their card if there are too many outstanding documents.

The team has also left behind hours of wasted time managing manual bank reconciliations. Now, all of the spend data flows in perfect sync between our expense management solution and the ERP integration, meaning no more data entry or endless checks.

Next-level customer service and customisation

At Payhawk, we take pride in providing our customers with first-class advice and troubleshooting. As well as supporting them to get the biggest benefits from our solution possible.

Porsche e-Bikes wanted to customise the solution to support their expense categorisation and further simplify accounting, budgeting, and spend control. We worked with the team to suggest several possible solutions and helped adapt the software to their specific requirements. The latter allowed them to use additional custom fields and expense categorisation to get a complete picture of team and project spend and keep a close eye on performance.

"It's crucial to have good customer support," explains Gabriela. "And the Payhawk team has proven to be supportive in every situation. The communication is always clear. And whenever we have questions, we get answers fast."

Putting your company in the fast lane

Is your business looking to improve business travel expense management? Take control of spend? Or improve overall visibility? Then it’s time to switch gears to something more powerful and put the brakes on outdated spend management. Book a demo with us today to learn more.