Payhawk achieves Built for NetSuite partner status

NetSuite is among the most popular software choices for mid-size, large, and growing businesses like yours. The cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution will help you manage your financials, customer relationships, stock control, and other critical operations.

The missing piece in the puzzle? Corporate credit cards with robust controls and automated expense management to save time, money, and effort. And that's where we come in. At Payhawk, our customers have been reaping the benefits of both our spend management features and our direct NetSuite integration for over two years.

As Giancarlo Bruni, CFO at e-commerce business Heroes described:

"As a CFO, I want to know how much money and profit we have in real-time and what levers I need to pull. As a business, we also need to know about our stock, including when it's arriving, how much is in transit, and if we need more. I can see all of this via my ERP, plus I can see spending in real-time thanks to the direct integration with my expense management software, Payhawk.”

Seamless end-to-end spend data

As of this month, we have customers using the live NetSuite integration across more than 28 countries, transacting with over 100,000 suppliers.

What could you expect if you were one of them?

“We have five entities, with approx 300-500 expenses a month in the parent company,” Eduardo Felipez, Management Accountant at Heroes explained. “It used to take me one whole day per entity to review, import, export, and put the expenses in the correct format. But with Payhawk's direct integration to NetSuite, I spend just an hour a day on this. It's an enormous help."

International e-commerce company Heroes reduced their expense review time from five days to five hours with our direct integration to NetSuite

Like Heroes, you’ll get a slick integration, built for finance professionals around the accruals concept, that lets you do the following and more:

• Reconcile with zero input errors
• Completely avoid manual entry or visibility delays
• Save hours (and even days!) that you’d otherwise spend on data entry and verification for reconciliation
• Enjoy hassle-free automatic updates to the connector
• Get started super fast with a sync of custom segments, custom records & transaction fields out of the box, auto-updated master data, and real-time analytics
• Leverage the support of NetSuite Alliance Partners like Macrofin, Balkan Services, and RSM Spain

"We're excited to partner with Payhawk as it's a great payment solution," said Ross Latta, CEO of MacroFin, an award-winning NetSuite Alliance partner and Payhawk's Solution Partner. "We use Payhawk for our own spend management and are really pleased with our experience. Our employees use Payhawk cards for their expenses, and the seamless integration to NetSuite provides visibility and control around our costs and invoice payments."

Making month-end a breeze with a direct NetSuite integration

‘Month-end madness’ is all too real for some finance teams. But as a Payhawk customer your month-end could be fast and stress-free.

With our spend management solution and native NetSuite integration, you get streamlined financial processes, a reduced manual workload, enhanced data accuracy, and real-time visibility. Together, these contribute to a rapid, efficient month-end close with
deeper, more impactful insights.

Howard Thompson, Global Financial Controller at international digital events company, GDS Group, explained:

"As we have all of our expenses coded up to project codes in the Payhawk solution, we can report on our margins by event and so on at the end of each month. Payhawk has done a great job of ensuring that we can get that custom field from NetSuite and the project code from NetSuite into Payhawk."

GDS Group isn't alone. Our integration has seen many of our larger customers leverage the power of a connected spend management and NetSuite ERP experience. As of September, 2023, we’ve helped them achieve:

• Over 250,000 exported expenses
• More than €110,000,000 in total payments (Euros)
• 106,435 imported suppliers and growing
• 99.70% of expenses exported with zero manual intervention (August 2023)
• 434.28% average increase in expense exports per quarter

How does it work?

With Payhawk, your accounting parameters sync effortlessly and automatically with NetSuite.

After linking your NetSuite subsidiary with our solution, you can:

• Align your chart of accounts, VAT Rates, departments, and classifications
• Establish NetSuite bank accounts for all active currencies
• Create Payhawk 'General and Fees' accounts
• Synchronise Payhawk and NetSuite balances starting from a designated date
• Instantly transmit payments and expenses in real time

You need to choose four key configurations when setting up your Payhawk expense management solution with NetSuite:

1. Define how different expense types should be exported into NetSuite (Differentiating between Vendor Bills, Expense Reports and Journal Entries)
2. Choose between direct posting in the GL accounts, non-inventory or service items
3. Create or link Payhawk wallets to NetSuite bank accounts
4. Specify the account for handling FX & ATM Fees, with an added feature where Payhawk generates a suspense account (Payhawk General) if mapping encounters any issues

The process is straightforward: when a cardholder makes a payment, they snap a photo of the receipt, our OCR reads the uploaded photo and suggests the category, giving the employee the option to adjust it (choosing from a user-friendly list of categories). The expense appears in the system immediately, meaning the finance team can track it in seconds, with all spending seamlessly transferring from our solution straight into NetSuite.

Supporting data-led decision-making

From companies switching over to NetSuite to publicly listed organisations who've used the solution for years, our direct integration supports businesses to capture and analyse spend for better, faster, and more accurate decision-making.

Take the international entertainment and hospitality company, State of Play. Managing expenses across various operators in a multi-venue hospitality organisation like State of Play is complex, requiring the finance team to monitor spending, forecast, and ensure compliance. But with our customisable categories and corresponding NetSuite codes, the team can tackle challenges like identifying variance, pinpointing overspending, and more.

"We really rely on the customisable class settings within Payhawk to distinguish between venues so we can analyse performance," Andrew Jacobi, VP of US Finance at State of Play, told us. "We create the custom fields that our cardholders use to categorise their spend. So, whether it's categorising between venues or categorising it into the right at general ledger code, it's extremely helpful in terms of how we allocate spend."

"At the end of the period, we look at two things. First, were we able to forecast our spend properly? For this, we put Payhawk directly in the hands of our venue managers so they can report on what they're spending money on. This approach means they can track spend against their budget and ensure they're meeting it across each general ledger category," Andrew continued. "Then, at the end of the period, we look at variance to budget — seeing whether a spend category exceeded or came in under budget. Payhawk allows us to spot if there's overspending in specific places up and down our P&L very quickly. For example, if we see that we're spending too much or more than expected on DJs in a particular venue."

"We can see what we spent on DJs over the period because of the invoices our operators submitted, and we categorised those invoices to the proper class and GL code, which is venue for us," said Andrew. "By looking at the spending, we can say, 'We planned $5,000 for this period, but we spent $7,000. So, what happened?' Were we overcharged? Did we increase the frequency of DJs? And if so, should we adjust the budget for the next period?"

Multi-entity management made simple

As an Oracle NetSuite SuiteCloud Developer Network Partner, we support both NetSuite and NetSuite OneWorld.

OneWorld is popular with international companies who want to manage more than one entity from the same account. Like our multi-entity management features, OneWorld lets companies manage multiple accounts and currencies — all in one place.

"Now we save time and make better decisions thanks to complete visibility over our multi-entity spend."

"Taking corporate credit card transactions away from the traditional banks to a product that directly integrates with NetSuite was a game changer!" David Watson, Group Financial Controller at State of Play told us. "Now we save time and make better decisions thanks to complete visibility over our multi-entity spend."

Your next steps

Get seamless spend management, streamlined accounting, and real-time visibility at your growing business.

As Eduardo Felipez, Management Accountant at Heroes, explained:

"Payhawk's direct integration with NetSuite is a game-changer. It's basically 'one click and done' to export any info. It's much more time-efficient and gives me real-time visibility on the ERP.”

"Now, I can say how much we've spent, what we can spend, if we need to pause budgets, update budgets, optimise, etc., at any time. If a Senior Leader asks, what is this expense? And why are we spending so much here? I can comment and update spend policies in just a few clicks."

Find out more from our experts; book a demo today.