Achieving agility at Heura Foods with enhanced spend management, control, and visibility

Life before Payhawk

Before Payhawk, the team at Heura Foods was drowning in receipts. Everything was manual and paper-based, leaving the CFO Jaime López with no visibility over current spending.

"We used to have a huge stack of receipts that people would leave on a person's desk to be logged. We didn't see how much we paid or spent," Jaime explained. "It was all manual, and it was challenging to keep track of expenditure."

The lack of visibility also created issues beyond day-to-day expense tracking. As a growing business, Heura Foods wanted to encourage investor confidence, too, and therefore needed to demonstrate robust spend control with complete visibility over outgoings and cash flow.

The role of the CFO in an ever-expanding company

As CFO at a fast-growing company, Jaime Lopez plays a vital and dynamic role. His top priorities include managing cash flow, controlling team costs, and shaping growth strategies through accounting and data analysis.

Jaime also oversees legal compliance and manages investor relationships. And with so much on his plate, he and his team must lean on the right tools and technology to stay agile and make the most impactful decisions.

In short, Jaime leads departments crucial to Heura Foods' transformation in the food sector. Their progress is fueled by using the right technology and tools for their mission.

“We love the agility Payhawk gives us as a business,” Jaime described. “Everyone can upload receipts to the app (even those without a Payhawk card), meaning we can visualise and control spending in real time.”

The Heura Foods team can also monitor expense trends, card registrations and cancellations and quickly extract financial data from receipts and invoices (with no human error).Jaime said:

"Payhawk makes a huge contribution at Heura… When you're growing fast, relying on automation and maintaining control as you expand and new people start is paramount."

Three non-negotiable features for Heura Foods

Different companies prioritise different features based on their unique needs. And, for Heura Foods, our following features are the most essential, non-negotiable, and well-used.

1. Process automation

Amid ambitious growth plans, manual tasks can really get in the way. Heura Food uses our solution to remove manual data entry, save time and effort and get real-time spend visibility via automatic reconciliation.

2. Real-time monitoring and reporting

Real-time spend visibility and accounting software integrations are vital to Heura Foods, too. Seeing up-to-date spending supports the team in doing the following and more:

• Make data-based decisions
• Save time on manual tasks and improve efficiency
• Onboard new teammates and issue cards faster and with fewer risks
• Maintain robust investor relationships with up-to-date expenditure figures

3. Supporting users with adaptable approval flows and a simple, intuitive app

Approval flows are also a big deal for the team at Heura Foods. Well-controlled expenses are important for companies of any size, but for growing businesses they can mean make or break.

Jaime needed approval controls to work smoothly, making it easy for his colleagues to focus on their tasks without any hassle.

"We've decided to set up a fairly basic approval system, but it works well,” Jaime said. “We still like to rely on trust in our employees to an extent, but the Payhawk has helped make everything much more straightforward."

Another way we help Heura Foods make spend management straightforward? Our user-friendly and intuitive application.

“The learning process for using Payhawk is smooth,” Jaime told us. “It ensures that employees easily adapt and onboard without any issues.”

Subscriptions are easier to manage, too. We automatically flag recurring spend for the team to mark as a subscription. We then estimate the expected billing for every subscription and inform them how much of the card's funds will cover the expense.

The features above and more let the team:

• Uncover hidden costs
• Eliminate cost creep
• Avoid overspending

Why Payhawk and not some other expenditure management solution?

The team at Heura Foods did their research on spend management solutions before deciding on us.

"We were looking for a spend management solution that would help us improve efficiency and move faster with automation and controls," explained Jaime. "Payhawk's functions were best, and the package was most competitive."

Apart from a great anecdotal experience, we have improved efficiency for Heura Foods in multiple concrete ways, including saving time.

Jaime told us:

“We estimate a saving of half a day to one whole day a month per person entering and validating paper receipts”.

For an ever-expanding company like Heura Foods, spend management software that automates processes and keeps track of expenditure as it happens is vital.

If improving spend visibility and control sounds, real-time reporting, and automated manual work sounds like something that could help your company: Book a demo today.