Enhancing the expense process across global FFW offices

Life before Payhawk

As a successful global agency, FFW has some complex challenges. With team members making payments using different methods across different countries, the business had to find a way to standardise and support the expense process. And get better visibility and control over spend.

"We used different solutions for different European entities," Krasimir Angelov, Finance Manager Europe & Managing Director Bulgaria at FFW, explained. "In some entities, we did bank payments for reimbursements of personal card payments. While, in others such as Denmark and the UK, we used Webexpenses as an expense management solution."

Krasimir and the wider business understood they needed to pull all spend management together to run efficiently and stay scalable. And they felt that Payhawk offered the best, most comprehensive solution for the job.

Taking control of complex global spend

"The main challenge for FFW is the complex structure and distributed teams all over Europe and the globe. We have sixteen offices in eight countries across Europe which creates complexity and adds the challenge of finding a solution that fits the needs of all or most of the FFW entities," Krasimir said. "Essentially, we were looking for how we can facilitate and optimise employee card payments, enhance real-time cost control and allow implementation of internal approval policy at the same time."

The answer lies in a globally-supportive solution that allows for cross-border spend, custom policy setting, bulk policy controls, and multi-entity management.

With Payhawk, the team at FFW has a complete spend management solution, including corporate cards and expense management software. Our solution gives them full control over their global expenses and real-time visibility of exactly what is being spent, when, where, and why.

"We went through a process of evaluations and comparisons of different expense management solutions," Krasimir said. "We needed an all-around solution that can work for multiple locations, jurisdictions, and currencies and add value to our organisation and financial processes."

Now all FFW cardholders can effortlessly snap a picture of their receipt, swiftly upload it via the OCR in the app, select a spend category (from the list pre-set by finance), and job done. At the same time, the pre-set FFW approval policy allows all the expenses to be approved with a single click on any device. The hassle-free process is minimum effort and means that the spend is already visible to the finance team and the data is captured and ready for processing via the ERP or accounting software.

Innovative integrations for agility and visibility

Another important benefit for FFW was smart and seamless integrations.

"It's important for us that Payhawk integrates with the other software tools we're using, including accounting systems, travel booking solutions, banks etc," said Krasimir.

At Payhawk, we do things differently when it comes to integrations. Our main goal is to make sure data flows smoothly and accurately. Here are some of the ways it supports our customers like FFW to do the following:

• Get all the essential info in one place through the ERP system to track categories, account codes, VAT rates, classes, and more
• Swerve manual reconciliation. Every expense in Payhawk has an invoice and payment date, so it reflects the right timing according to the accruals principle
• Follow accounting and ERP logic with "true" transaction types
• Forget about making mistakes. We use purchase invoices, bills, bank receipts, and payments instead of complicated manual journals
• Correct foreign exchange transactions following the IAS 21 guidelines.

"The transparency that Payhawk provides lets us get a much better overview of company spend. And having our corporate card transactions in one place (and only a click away) adds value to our finance process, contributing to better cost control and optimisation," Krasimir explained. "And the integrations with accounting and travel booking systems help us to minimise the time spent on transferring the data and ensuring the quality and accuracy of the data transferred."

Saving time on spend management and support

FFW saves hours every day thanks to our automation and machine learning features. No more manual data means no more wasted time on double and triple checking spend information or chasing receipts.

"Embedded technologies such as the OCR allow us to reduce the time we spend processing and entering data," Krasimir explained.* "These optimisations allow us to focus more on the 'control' side and the quality of the information rather than on the technical and manual work."*

And when it comes to support, FFW recognises that while they're a forward-thinking digital agency, nothing beats talking to a human. "The Payhawk customer success team is the best," Krasimir shared. "Always fast and responsive, providing quick and precise support and instructions in case we need help or assistance."

Do you value fast and responsive human customer support too? Would you appreciate having one unified solution for managing all your company expenses? Then wait no more and book a demo today.