Supporting international business spend at Abacum

Life before Payhawk

As a fast-growing fintech, Abacum needed to change many of its processes to ensure smooth and efficient scaling. The team’s requirements are almost unrecognisable from those of two years ago, and they wanted to make sure they could manage business spend quickly and on the go as they grew.

“Before Payhawk, we did everything manually,” Jorge Lluch, co-founder and COO at Abacum, explained. “We had an Excel file that we sent to employees where we requested them to fill in any payment details. They then had to physically attach, or scan and email, any corresponding receipts and send them over to the finance team.”

Controlling unnecessary costs was an issue too. As post-Covid-19 restrictions eased, the team began travelling and spending internationally, meaning their FX costs increased fast, and expenses became harder to track.

Going global: Taking control of business travel expenses and multi-entity spend

Abacum has three entities in Spain and three in the US and as such, the team manages both multiple entity spend and a lot of international spend on business travel.

“We use Payhawk across our entities in Spain and to support with a lot of international expenses around business travel,” Jorge said. “As we grew and started travelling more, we needed to track spending more efficiently, roll out our flexible expense policies, and achieve lower FX fees.”

At Payhawk, our expense management features make business travel spending easier and more cost-effective. From mileage and per diems to in-built spend policies and accommodation bookings with our TravelPerk integration, business travel is fast and efficient for both the traveller and the finance team back at HQ.

“Traditional credit cards didn’t make sense as they have no automation. Plus, we wanted more control as we scaled across the organisation — especially when it came to international travel,” Jorge told us.

Our corporate credit and debit cards and connected expense management software come with time-saving AI and automation, including:

• Receipt and invoice data capture via OCR software
• Automatic receipt chasing
• Customisable approvals and workflows
• Card controls like freezes and blocks
• Subscription management, and more

“Using Payhawk has helped us take control of business expenses, policies, and compliance,” Jorge continued. “And, it’s helped avoid admin, paperwork, Excel back and forth, and reimbursements via payroll.”

Solving scaling challenges with Payhawk

"We were a completely different company when we started using Payhawk," explained Jorge. "We had much higher manual costs and bank fees, and our users spent at least an hour each month catching up on and submitting expenses."

Since switching to us for their European entities, Abacum has lowered their FX fees, swerved bank fees, and saved their finance team and cardholders' hours on expense management.

We have helped Abacum scale its financial management as they have grown, with bulk card issuance, low fund alerts across entities, customisable workflows, a real-time integration to NetSuite, and more.

"Payhawk has helped us support growth efficiently," said Jorge. "It lets our finance team use their time effectively — instead of chasing and entering receipts and manually double-checking data and errors."

Ready to scale the way your business manages spend?

At Payhawk, we've helped Abacum support its cardholders to spend easily and on the go without straying out of policy.

We've also supported them to scale efficiently, take better control over expenses and get good real-time visibility over spend.

Book a demo today if you want to learn more about how smart spend management can support scaling in your business.