Pleo expense management software review: a complete guide and platform walkthrough

The platform’s offering includes physical and virtual payment cards (issued by Mastercard), automated expense management, digital receipt capture, a mobile app (Android and iOS), an analytics dashboard, and a wide range of third-party integrations to help businesses better manage company finances.

Pleo’s platform can be used by companies within different industries, like healthcare, retail, transport, technology, or agencies.

If your finance department still receives paper receipts, you should consider getting Pleo. It will save time for account managers and even CFOs on administrative work and reporting.

For businesses whose employees regularly travel for business, a travel management solution is vital for helping them manage their business travel expenses, all while saving time and reducing travel costs.

For example, if you’re familiar with the hours of hassle spent wrangling with hundreds of invoices and dealing with missing receipts at the end of every month, these platforms provide consolidated monthly invoicing functionality. This means employees no longer need to pay upfront and then request reimbursements.

The

integration between Pleo and Travelperk

enables employees using a Pleo card to automatically match TravelPerk receipts with Pleo expenses to facilitate a streamlined expense management process.

TravelPerk has a massive inventory of travel service providers on the market and offers an all-in-one solution to simplify how you book, manage, and report on your corporate travel. The platform provides centralized invoicing for easy budget management, 24/7 customer support from real humans, and real-time expense reports to access deep insights into your spending.

Learn more about how TravelPerk integrates with Pleo to make business expense management a breeze

here

.

Pleo supports the following languages: English, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

Probably the first thing you’ll want to do is to order virtual or physical (or both) cards for your employees and set up their own spending limits.

And, of course, you can also manage your personal card:

In the Expenses section, as an admin, you can see the company’s available wallet balance and recent expenses.

You can also manually add an expense here by adding a receipt.

Admins can study the expenses of their employees in detail and also assign categories to expenses — for example, Subscriptions and Software (for SaaS products that you use), or Hardware (in case someone purchased a laptop, for example), or Internet & Telephone (in case your company is covering someone’s Internet bill).

The Analytics section (available only to paying Pleo customers) provides reporting on your company’s expenses which you can organize in any way you want. For example, you can learn how much money your company spends on marketing, or what kind of expenses a certain employee reports. You can build all sorts of different reports here, and on the screenshot you just see an example of one:

In Invoices, you can find and sort invoices that require payment or are scheduled or have already been paid. And you can approve or reject invoices that are pending approval. There are many sorting options for invoices — for example, you can sort them by status.

You can also manage your company’s Subscriptions in a section conveniently separated in the main menu to provide you insights into what recurring payments might be happening on your accounts.

Then, there is Wallet. Admins can see transaction history and top their wallets up.

You can also find transactions by time period and download the balance statement:

You can top the wallet up via bank transfer or direct debit. And you can set up an automated top-up if you want it to happen regularly but don’t want to do it manually.

You can choose to top up from any top bank available in your country. In the UK, for example, Pleo allows top-up from 50+ banks.

There is also a Pocket feature that allows you to keep track of out-of-pocket expenses, mileage, or expenses paid for using withdrawn company cash. Employees may add expenses manually using Pleo’s desktop and mobile apps.

As an admin, you can manage the employee directory, add or remove users, and set up individual card spending limits. You can add people manually or in bulk by uploading a file. You can also give access to Pleo to an external bookkeeper.

In Export, you can set up the export of receipts into your accounting system.

Speaking of accounting systems, Pleo integrates with 30 of those:

You can connect Pleo with such accounting software as Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Billy, Datev, Dinero, Fortnox, Inventio and many others. It is nice that Pleo is integrated with some local accounting tools that people use in certain countries.

The accounting system can be set up in Settings:

In Settings, you can have many more Pleo functions hidden but most importantly, you can manage your account’s billing, invite employees and manage the company’s info.

In the Review section of Settings, admins and bookkeepers can approve card and Pocket expenses company-wide. As written on Pleo’s platform, Company Review can be enabled alongside Team Review for a multi-step review process. By enabling both Company Review and Team Review, all expenses and Pocket reimbursements will require two sets of approvals.

In Settings, you can also set up Benefit allowances, and make them custom for each team member.

And you have a separate section for Mileage where you can set up mileage rates, download claims and see the mileage expenses.

Settings also offer Power-ups where you can enable integrations with tools (besides ERPs) that Pleo is integrated with.

TravelPerk is proud to be one of them. Together with Pleo, TravelPerk makes up an end-to-end business travel expense management solution.

TravelPerk

is a best-in-class business travel management platform that helps customers easily book and manage corporate travel. The solution integrates with other tools including many popular expense management solutions, including

Pleo

.

How it works:

Learn more about TravelPerk & Pleo

here

.

Settings also give access to OpenAPI for cases when your company wants to build your custom integration with Pleo and other tools in your workflow, to reduce the amount of manual admin work.

For example, an employee buys lunch using their corporate Pleo card (that can also be conveniently added to Apple Pay or Google Pay). Pleo’s system automatically notices a new expense and sends a notification reminding your employee to properly submit the claim.

Employees can make a photo of the receipt and assign the category of the expense to it right in the app.

And they can even associate the expense with a certain client of theirs which helps accountants and finance managers as well as managers of your employees to keep an eye on overall spend and ROI.

To help you see Pleo in action, watch this short video that explains how Pleo’s virtual and plastic cards work and how to administrate your Pleo account.

The video walks you through how to make in-person and online purchases, upload receipts, and how administrators manage employee expenses.

Plus, all of the expense management systems above also integrate with TravelPerk to help businesses simplify travel spending and expense processes from start to finish.

To find out more, check out the expense management category on TravelPerk’s

marketplace

.

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This review is also available in

Spanish

and

French

.