Supporting a lean finance team with spend automation at Plan A

Life before Payhawk

Before using Payhawk, Plan A manually paid and processed all of its business payments across several channels. Invoice and expense approvals took place offline via Slack or e-mail, and there was no standardised process. The lack of a unified approach meant that the team struggled to implement the four-eyes principle and needed help to track their audit trail.

Employees sent supplier invoices and expense reimbursement requests to the Finance Team's mailbox, and the respective line manager had to approve them. Then they were uploaded to the DATEV accounting system and paid out via a bank integration.

Back then, Plan A had very limited access to bank-issued company credit cards, and their receipt collection was a nightmare.

Strategic partners and countless benefits

In the Summer of 2021, Plan A and Payhawk became strategic partners. Plan A wanted a spend management solution, including corporate Visa cards and expense management software. While at Payhawk, we wanted to measure our environmental footprint and improve our ESG reporting (which will soon be mandatory for many European companies).

Since using Payhawk, Plan A has saved two days of manual admin per month through our solution's automation and AI. We've also improved Plan A's spend control and visibility and provided more opportunities for analysis and improvement.

Plan A has saved two days of manual finance admin per month since moving to Payhawk.

Our solution also allows for a complete trail of documents, which improved the audit process at Plan A and saved them the time and stress of searching for past payments.

Finally, Plan A has been able to keep its finance operations very lean and postpone or even phase out future hires in the team. Specifically, the Finance Team at Plan A mentions that thanks to Payhawk, they have been able to:

• Implement internal controls more quickly and effectively
• Access to internal pre-accounting, which saves time and reduces re-work for an outsourced accounting function
• Increase the transparency of company spend to heads of department with approval flows
• Improve monitoring and optimise budgets
• Scale employee access to company cards

Support at the touch of a button

Apart from the automation benefits, Plan A highlights that the support from our team has been outstanding. The access to real people via the chat has been incredibly valuable and a welcome step change from a typical SaaS.

"Having a chat function integrated within the platform is pivotal to ensuring an efficient and effective resolution of queries. While chat is becoming more and more common across SaaS platforms, the response rate from Payhawk is noticeably faster than most."

Like the sound of improving your financial function and getting spend visibility at your company? Take payments and expenses to the next level at your business, book a demo now.