VinciWorks takes control of company spend with Payhawk

VinciWorks builds compliance training and software for regulated industries, serving over 2,000 customers, including 65% of the world's top 100 law firms. Before Payhawk, the entire business ran its spending through a single corporate credit card, with traditional bank cards from HSBC and Xero sitting disconnected from the source of that spend.

With everything flowing through one card, finance had no way to see who was spending what or against which budget, and month-end meant manually matching and allocating one large statement line by line. Marketing spend alone was a massive spend category running into hundreds of thousands across advertising, conferences, and SaaS subscriptions, so the lack of categorisation hurt. There were no per-vendor or per-project limits, no enforced receipt submission, and finance spent time every month chasing the sales and marketing teams for receipts. They knew there was a better way.

Spend visibility was a major issue. Shmuli Goldberg, the CMO, needed to see marketing spend across dozens of vendors and campaigns, and the single-card setup made that impossible. Meanwhile, the manual entry and visibility lag between their bank and accounting software, Xero, was another major issue. So, Shmuli, together with Finance Director Jonathan Beller, looked for a better way and discovered Payhawk.

The team deployed Payhawk back in November 2023 and now runs over 90 active corporate cards, with a dedicated card for each vendor and subscription, from Google Ads to HubSpot, (plus virtual cards created on demand for time-limited projects like conferences).

Real-time visibility and a clean month-end are now a reality too with transactions, categories, and cost centres syncing straight into Xero, meaning no more manual matching.

Policy is more robust and easier to enforce now, too. The team loves features like auto-blocking card controls for multiple late receipt submissions (the card blocks spend until the employee uploads the outstanding documents). And they have onboarded multiple entities on one platform, meaning no more tool switching or missing visibility.

With Payhawk, VinciWork's painful finance issues are solved: instead of one undifferentiated statement, each vendor and project now has its own card, so spend is categorised the moment it happens and finance can see who spent what against which budget. Department budgets give the marketing and sales leads colour-coded visibility into their own utilised and committed spend without going through finance.

The auto-blocking controls shifted receipt compliance onto employees, and the Xero feed removed the manual allocation work entirely. When it comes to the economics, the monthly card spend of around meant cashback covered the full subscription by the second month.

The partnership goes from strength to strength too, as VinciWorks has expanded its footprint with Payhawk across the group, going from one entity at launch to three. As part of a private equity group with around 20 portfolio companies, that multi-entity setup leaves room to bring more of the group onto the same platform over time.