Spendesk has helped our teams move away from administrative tasks and focus on much more analytical work.

Key results with Spendesk

• End of paper-based processes: expense reports moved from 100% physical to fully digital workflows.

• Full digitisation in 60 days: the transformation reached all entities in just two months.

• Multi-entity visibility: real-time spend control across five countries and eight locations.

• Finance team transformation: the accounting team moved away from administrative tasks to focus on higher-value analysis.

• Adoption far above forecast: from 50 expected users to 145 active users.

• Zero out-of-pocket advances: employees no longer have to advance money from their own pockets.

• Seamless ERP integration: data flow with accounting systems was fully automated.

About Pierre Frey

Pierre Frey is a French family-owned design house founded in 1935, specialising in fabrics, wallpapers, carpets and furniture. The company combines artisan tradition with innovation, with workshops in France and the United Kingdom. It serves design professionals in more than 80 countries and has contributed to iconic projects such as the Château de Versailles and the White House.

The challenge

Before implementing Spendesk, Pierre Frey's financial processes had fallen far behind its capacity for creative innovation. This created both operational and strategic challenges across its international operations.

Key challenges

• Expense reports were 100% paper-based and required manually processing around 50 reports per month.

• Each report included 10 to 20 lines that had to be entered by hand.

• There was no digital audit trail or consolidated spend dashboard for the whole organisation.

• Employees had to advance money from their own pockets for business purchases.

• There was a single corporate card for the entire company, plus a separate fuel card system.

• There was no real-time visibility across entities and geographies.

• The finance team spent most of its time on administrative tasks rather than strategic analysis.

• Operations required support in multiple languages — French, English and German — depending on the entity.

• There was no visibility of company expenses without physically retrieving paper documentation.

The solution

Pierre Frey chose Spendesk's Premium solution to address complex needs including multi-entity management, multilingual support and seamless ERP integration.

Features implemented

• Multi-entity rollout across five countries with unified processes.

• Physical and virtual cards to eliminate employee out-of-pocket advances.

• Multilingual support for operations in French, English and German.

• ERP integration to streamline data flow into accounting systems.

• CSV export to accommodate specific accounting processes.

• Automated approval workflows replacing paper-based processes.

• Real-time spend visibility across all entities and geographies.

From paper to digital in 60 days

The transformation was remarkably fast. Pierre Frey deployed Spendesk in December 2021 and reached full digital maturity across the organisation by February 2022, just two months later.

This rapid adoption was driven by both the platform's ease of use and the urgent need to modernise processes. What previously required hours of manual data entry, document retrieval and reconciliation is now done automatically. The team gained real-time spend visibility across all entities, with approval workflows and traceability built into every transaction.

The rollout also exceeded initial forecasts. Although Pierre Frey had set a target of 50 users, the platform now supports 145 active users — nearly three times the initial estimate. Employees now have Spendesk cards, eliminating personal advances and enabling controlled spending capacity across the whole organisation.

The results

Since adopting Spendesk six years ago, Pierre Frey has fundamentally transformed its financial operations:

• Digital transformation in two months: from paper to fully digital management in 60 days.

• Adoption far above forecast: from 50 expected users to 145 active users.

• End of paper processing: manual processing of expense reports was eliminated.

• Finance team transformation: moved from administrative tasks to strategic analysis.

• Real-time multi-entity visibility: full control across five countries.

• Zero out-of-pocket advances: employees no longer have to cover expenses out of their own pockets.

• Seamless ERP integration: data flow with accounting systems fully automated.

• Long-term consolidated partnership: six years of ongoing collaboration and shared development.

Next step: AI as a financial co-pilot

Having successfully digitised spend management, Pierre Frey is now focused on leveraging artificial intelligence to take the finance function from a reactive to a predictive approach. Benjamin has collaborated with Spendesk on developing new AI agents and shows particular interest in those capable of automatically reconciling purchase orders and invoices, detecting discrepancies and providing strategic insights.

He also values Spendesk's vision of opportunities that go beyond automation into the realm of financial intelligence: an AI capable of identifying supplier patterns, anticipating cash flow pressures and providing anonymised benchmarking against comparable companies.

Want to modernise your financial operations?

Discover how Spendesk can help your business eliminate paper processes, gain cross-entity visibility and free your finance team to focus on more strategic work. Talk to an expert today.