Pennylane Integration: Why to connect with a spend management platform

Pennylane integration: How to connect spend management for faster month-end close

Pennylane is a leading choice for businesses based in France and already investing in Germany and BeNeLux. And it’s easy to see why, it centralises accounting, invoicing, payments, and cash flow all into one platform. Pennylane helps finance teams, and French accountants work together without having to navigate multiple disconnected tools.

But as your business grows, company spending becomes more complex. Recurring payments build up, employee expenses multiply, and suddenly, maintaining real-time visibility becomes almost impossible.

Integrating with a spend management platform can help your organization capture and tightly control spend, without disempowering cardholders. Which is what you want, right?

Pennylane simplifies finance for growing businesses

Pennylane is built to be accessible. Accessible for finance teams, of course, but also business owners and accountants. With accounting, expenses, payments, invoices, and cash flow all under one roof, it becomes much easier for these teams to work together.

With a focus on automation and real-time visibility, Pennylane eliminates the need for disparate systems that cause problems such as inaccurate spend data and slow invoice payment processes.

It’s a great solution for small to medium-sized businesses looking to finally ditch those spreadsheets and embrace financial insight. But it only works so well if spend is predictable and limited. What happens as you scale and processes become more complex, you hire more staff, or you open new entities? Complexity creeps in and spreads.

Finance teams are still chasing information instead of analyzing it

Chasing information is busywork. It doesn’t move the business forward, yet it consumes hours every month for finance teams in growing companies.

For example, when expenses come from cards, reimbursements, per diems, and mileage claims, finance teams often spend days collecting receipts, correcting VAT codes, and reconciling CSV exports at month-end.

So, if your accounting tool is only managing expenses partly at source, then maybe it’s time for an integration that levels it up?

Why Pennylane users integrate a spend management platform

You need a solution that addresses what happens before a transaction reaches your Pennylane system.

Pennylane users typically look for a spend management integration when manual processes start to slow the business down. These are the most common signs.

• Transaction volume has outgrown manual review. Going from five to 50 cardholders multiplies reconciliation work. What was once manageable quickly becomes a bottleneck.
• Cross-border spending introduces FX and VAT complexity. International suppliers and currencies add tax and compliance risk that’s difficult to control after the fact.
• Month-end close keeps slipping. Longer close cycles often indicate that spend isn’t structured or approved early enough in the process.

How a spend management platform complements Pennylane

Rather than replacing Pennylane, a spend management platform handles what happens before transactions reach your accounting system.

Pennylane

• Accounting, reporting, and compliance
• Cash flow and payment visibility
• Collaboration with external accountants

Spend management platform

• Captures spend at the source
• Applies policies and approvals before posting
• Sends clean, pre-coded data into Pennylane

Why this works

• Reinforces non-competitive positioning
• Makes the division of responsibilities obvious
• Easier to scan

With this kind of integration, there are no raw transactions entering your accounting system that still need processing. Instead, the spend management system approves, categorises, and reconciles it before it reaches Pennylane.

How does Payhawk complement Pennylane?

This integration focuses on automating company- and employee-related spend, payments, taxes and fees before data even reaches Pennylane.

1. Automated export of company expenses

We cover the full scope of company spend:

• Invoices
• Card transactions

This also includes employee-related expenses

• Per diems
• Mileage claims
• Reimbursements

You can choose to handle employees as suppliers or use dummy accounts for simplified accounting. This way, also employee-spend automatically flows into Pennylane, in accordance with your bookkeeping needs.

Teams should still assess whether they need additional tools for areas like payroll or complex multi-entity consolidation.

Why it matters. pend is a particularly manual part of financial operations, because it relies on collecting evidence like receipts, entering data, and chasing approvals. So automating it makes sense, removing friction without complicating your current setup.

2. Automated exports of all payments

Payment reconciliation is a tedious manual process. But with Payhawk, your payments sync automatically to Pennylane.

Why it matters. Having a platform that manages both expenses and payments means finance gets a unified view of all company spending. This means there’s no need to reconcile across multiple systems.

3. Tax rates that match Pennylane’s

With a list of tax rates for French tax requirements, you need your spend management tool to support customizing them so they match.

Why it matters. The ability to customize tax rates reduces errors and simplifies posting to Pennylane. This means you will always apply VAT codes and tax treatments correctly at the point of spend, further speeding up your month-end close.

So, who benefits from integrating Pennylane with Payhawk?

• Any team with employee spend, cards, and recurring payments. If spending includes a mix of company cards, supplier invoices, recurring payments, and employee expenses, you might find managing them through different systems can cause friction.
• Businesses transitioning from spreadsheets or partial automation. If you’re still using bank cards and manual expense reports, integrating with Payhawk can automate spend capture, which is essential as you scale.
• Small and mid-sized teams using Pennylane as a finance hub. You might not yet need an ERP system, but you probably have enough company spending to make manual processes tedious.
• Finance teams looking for control without losing the simplicity of Pennylane. You like Pennylane’s intuitive, user-friendly approach, but you don’t want anything to be complex. Integrating with a spend management system should make all finance operations easier, not harder.

Keeping Pennylane simple as your business scales

A spend management platform like Payhawk handles the complexities of automating company finances with ease. From capturing transactions at source, applying custom spending controls, and approvals before spend happens, to sending clean, structured data into Pennylane.

If you want Pennylane to stay simple as spend grows more complex, integrating it with a spend management platform like Payhawk is a logical next step. Book a demo to see how Payhawk works alongside Pennylane.