Inside Spendesk: May 2019 Update

Most companies pride themselves on being customer-centric. But survey after survey shows that, despite all the talk, a very small percentage of businesses actually achieve this goal.

We believe the biggest barrier to achieving this is the lack of actually meeting the people you serve.

So we spent the last month visiting customers in Berlin, London, Brussels, Lyon, Toulouse, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. We welcomed new customers to our Paris headquarters for onboarding sessions over breakfast, and we hosted three events where they could meet other smart finance leaders in their neighborhood.

We’re excited to share some of their stories and the new features we’ve built from their feedback.

What’s new in Spendesk?

Let’s start with some of the most notable changes we have made to our product over the past few weeks.

Custom accounting exports

One of Spendesk’s chief goals is to make life easier for finance teams. That means getting rid of all the tedious manual work that comes with processing expenses and tracking payments. And it also includes making sure that your bookkeeping software speaks the same language as Spendesk.

Which is why it’s so exciting to have custom accounting exports. You can set up Spendesk with the same labels and accounting codes as you have in Xero, Quickbooks, or your bookkeeping tool of choice.

It’ll only take a few minutes to set up, but will save you a lifetime of reformatting at the end of every month.

Automated VAT with Marvin

For those who do not know him yet, Marvin is our magical OCR bot and he is likely to become your new best friend. OCR software lets us read a receipt or invoice and input the data into Spendesk automatically.

When you’re dealing with a large number of documents every month, this is a big win.

Again, you don’t have to do anything. Marvin’s already working behind the scenes.

Team manager profiles

The last exciting update is the addition of team managers to Spendesk. You’re now able to appoint specific members as managers, with the ability to oversee all payments for their teams.

You still have your account owner(s) with full control over all spending. But when that person wants to delegate budget responsibility to team leads, they now can.

Give managers the authority they need, while keeping company spending in check.

Live CFO meetups

Jean-Baptiste Cousin, CFO at SMASH Group told us, “Nobody’s really excited to talk to the CFO. They want to talk about new features or the company retreat coming up. But they don’t want to talk about how we automated purchase orders.”

Well, we do want to talk to CFOs. And more importantly, we want to help CFOs connect with each other to share ideas.

Which is why we hosted three fantastic CFO Connect meetups last month:

• Berlin on May 21: Understanding equity incentives to attract talent with speakers Florent Artaud (Ekwity), Aiga Senftleben (Billie), Mazin Biviji (Toquity) and Filip Dames (Cherry Ventures)

• London on May 22: The CFO’s role in mergers and acquisitions with Dominic Jacquesson (Index Ventures), Florent Artaud (Ekwity), Christian Gabriel (Capdesk) and Ian Shaw (Orrick)

• Paris on May 28: How to scale your finance department featuring Philippe Platon (La Ruche Qui Dit Oui !) and our own CFO Fabien Dawidowicz.

We have more exciting events in more cities coming soon! If you’re a modern finance leader and you want to share your ideas with a community of smart, like-minded people, you should be there with us.

You can see all CFO Connect events here or can subscribe to the monthly newsletter.

Out and about

Besides the exciting product updates, live CFO events, and webinars, the team is making its presence felt all over the place.

NOAH Conference Berlin

Our CEO and co-founder, Rodolphe will be at NOAH19 in Berlin on June 14. If you happen to be in Berlin this week, you should stop to see him on stage.

A little customer love

While on the road, we couldn’t help stopping to meet a few of our customers in person. Here are the results of a few meet and greets.

Meet the Silverfin team who is building a connected accounting software to make financial reporting easier.

Hear from Amboss, who built an e-learning platform to help medical students study smarter.

Well, May was fun! We hope you’re excited to see what we have in store for June.