How City Relay scaled its expense management system

How did you handle company spending before Spendesk?

Before Spendesk, making a simple payment was difficult. Employees either had to pay out of pocket, which meant filling tedious expense claims or to get a hand on the corporate company cards which wasn't always an easy task.

My main challenge in addition to constantly chasing after missing invoices was to assign each payment to the right flat or project. Indeed, these circulating credit cards made it hard to track expenses as I never knew who had taken the card and for what.

We decided to set up Spendesk at the beginning of 2017, when we started to incur a lot of costs on behalf of our clients, the landlords, and had trouble monitoring and controlling them. As this is the basis of our service, finding a solution that would allow us to charge our clients for every expense was essential.

And now?

Everyone has access to the Spendesk platform, with a customised budget according to their position or team. Our operational teams, constantly need to buy small supplies for the apartments, and the capped plastic cards have made it very easy for them. They are much more autonomous and I can monitor and control their expenses in real time.

What is the main benefit for you?

The main advantage for me today, is to be able to charge our clients for every expense we make on their behalf. We can easily put a flat code in our custom fields, and thus assign each expense to a specific project, client or flat. At the end of the month, we simply do an export to excel and then charge them. It’s a real time saver and mitigates risk. Spendesk has also optimised our bookkeeping. In one click, I am able to push my payments to Xero and can reconcile them much quicker.

What would you say to other companies considering Spendesk?

It's the perfect tool if you want to have full visibility over your expenses, track them by person, by type of purchase and by flat.