Quadrupling productivity at Discordia

Life before Payhawk

Before Payhawk, Discordia's finance department at Discordia faced a major headache. Every month, they had to manually process and enter over 25,000 expense notes. Worse still, many of these receipts were crumpled, barely legible, and written in various European languages.

Drivers faced finance-related challenges, too. They received funds on their debit cards before each trip to cover expenses, often leading to issues like bank charges, seizures, and longer expense reporting times. And whenever they needed additional funds to cover unexpected fees, accidents, or fines, drivers had to wait indefinitely for the money to arrive, delaying their work and costing the company money.

Viliana Krasteva, Finance Supervisor at Discordia, says:

The company's growing fleet and the corresponding increase in work volume were becoming increasingly challenging. Data processing would require increasing amounts of time. We needed to streamline the core processes involved in managing and accounting for our drivers' expenses and those of other employees who generate business expenses.

Shifting gears: Improving conditions for Discordia drivers

Since moving to our spend management solution, the team at Discordia has hit two major goals at once.

On one hand, they improved their drivers' working conditions significantly. Drivers quickly found that once they started using Payhawk corporate cards, they no longer had to write extensive expense reports. Plus, they also had constant access to funds when on the road.

Discordia Driver Petyo Kozarov says:

For me, Payhawk is a big win because now I always have designated company money when I'm on the road. I don't use personal funds to pay parking, tolls, or fines. And I don't have to do extra reporting — with Payhawk's mobile app, I take pictures of receipts, and they go straight to the office.

We also help Discordia assist its drivers in unforeseen situations, such as road accidents or illness during a trip, with instant funds and no need for drivers to dip into personal money.

CFO Tsvetomir Uzunov explains:

Now, if someone falls ill on the road, we can send them money and put them up in a hotel immediately. And with the money, they can go to the doctor, which also helps. Imagine being somewhere in the world and experiencing such an incident, but without any resources, it would be such a bad situation.

Secondly, Discordia quickly saved money on FX fees once they started using our company cards instead of transferring money to employees' personal bank cards.

But money isn't the only thing the Discordia team started to save with Payhawk. Our automation has also helped them massively cut the time it takes to process expense documents and reduce the inaccuracies that occur when dealing with large amounts of information manually.

According to Tsvetomir Uzunov, Discordia has increased employee productivity over fourfold, and he believes that this effect will only increase as the company grows.

Peter Dimitrov, Project Manager at Discordia, describes:

"With Payhawk, we post the expense on the day it's generated. Before Payhawk? We had to wait to receive the expense in the mail.

Driving increased spend control and visibility

The finance team at Discordia also loves our corporate card control features. They use many of them, including: allowing or blocking ATM withdrawals, restricting card usage by day of the week, and limiting usage at specific types of merchants.

Now, they can monitor all company expenses as they happen, giving them more security and peace of mind. They have also eliminated all the manual expense processing in their ERP through our seamless integrations, reducing errors and improving accountability.

—Viliana Krasteva, Finance Supervisor at Discordia, explains:

Optical Document Recognition (OCR) has helped a lot with optimisation. Payhawk recognises different document types and even different vendors. Everything happens much faster.

Going the distance with better customer support and a proactive team

As Bulgaria's largest transport and logistics company, with over 2,000 drivers and plans to grow to 10,000 in the next six years, Discordia needed a user-friendly and scalable solution.

At Payhawk, our platform (including our user-friendly mobile app) is currently available in ten languages, including English, combined with an intuitive interface that is user-friendly for everyone.

Tsvetomir Uzunov says:

It was so important to us that Payhawk could offer a solution that supported our specific needs. A solution with a) a high-quality user experience and b) offers customer support and an interface in Bulgarian — something very specific but extremely important to us.

The team at Discordia say they have greatly benefited from Payhawk's local language support and also call out their experience with the Customer Success team as a major highlight.

Peter Dimitrov describes:

One of the most remarkable qualities of the Customer Success team at Payhawk is their proactive approach to customers. Rather than simply reacting to issues as they arise, they proactively contact us to check on our progress, identify potential areas for improvement, and provide proactive guidance and support. This level of proactive engagement sets them apart from other Customer Success teams we've worked with!

Like the sound of this story? And ready to shift gears with a spend management solution that's easy to navigate and backed by a dedicated team? Book a personalised demo now — and drive away with answers to all your questions.