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Payment card firm aims to revolutionise expenses

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30th Jan 2017
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A new fintech company is aiming to transform the expenses process by converging two separate businesses technologies – the company payment card and the expenses management tool.

Here on AccountingWEB we’ve seen plenty of new offerings claiming to change the expenses space. However, most still involve reporting after a transaction has taken place, resulting in manual data entry and receipt collation.

Fintech startup Expend aims to untangle the expenses knot with an automated system based on a payment card and expenses management app.

The system works as follows: A business issues an employee with an Expend card similar to a company payment or credit card but linked to an Expend account. The employee uses the card to make a purchase, and this instantly creates an expense claim using data captured during the transaction process.

The employee checks their Expend app or online dashboard, approves or amends the claim via the app, and it is then ready to be synced in real-time with the business’s accounting platform.

The employee’s app or dashboard shows all their transactions, allows them to attach images or notes, and can generate reminders for the employee to take a picture of the receipt after the transaction has taken place.

Converging technologies

Speaking to AccountingWEB Expend founders Johnny Vowles and Rudolph van Graan explained how they saw an opportunity in the expenses market to combine two technologies that many businesses have separate – the company card and the expenses management tool.

“It’s similar to a corporate card but with an automated process”, said Vowles. There’s no need to scan a receipt to get the information, it’s captured during the transaction process.

“From our customer’s point of view they have real time insight into what their employees are spending, and they can also control what they’re spending with budgets and types of spend”.

This granular control is a feature Expend plans to release later this year, and offers businesses the ability to turn off the card for certain type of expense and set individual budgets for each employee.

“If an employee is only supposed to use the card for basic travel you would give them £30 a week to get around London”, said van Graan, “and they wouldn’t be able to spend more than that on travel, even if there’s more money associated with the card as a whole.”

Category of spend

Some of the common gripes with expense management tools are around basic input errors such as missing digits, as well as issues such as the expense being added to the wrong category of spend.

According to Vowles and van Graan with Expend things like the supplier come pre-populated, but in terms of category of spend the system can make a prediction and learn from the user’s behaviour.

“If they select a category of spend for a certain place like Tesco the system learns next time what it’s likely to be”, said Vowles. “The system learns and makes a best guess, but it still allows the user to change it. All the user needs to do is double-check the claim information before it’s integrated with their company’s accounting platform.”

Crunch partnership

Expend is still in its early stages and recently ran a test partnership with Practice Excellence Award-winning firm Crunch, with 400 users of Crunch’s accounting software testing the app and offering feedback.

“We’re now at a point now where we’re integrating with all the key accounting platforms plus doing the old-fashioned csv that some people might want to export”, said Vowles. “The aim for this year is to support all the major players and open up Expend to all companies.”

Expend to expand

Expend is currently targeting small businesses frustrated with their expense processes.

“As soon as that’s running smoothly we’re going to add a few features that will make this usable for bigger companies”, said Vowles.

Features due to be released this year that may appeal to larger businesses and accountants include setting spending rules and viewing analytics.

Customers pay a flat monthly rate for the service, with no additional card fees and a 0% foreign exchange rate for transactions abroad. The basic product is currently set at £9.99 for each card user, with discounts available for early adopters and potential partners such as accountants.

More pricing tiers for premium features and packages targeted to different use cases are also in the pipeline as Expend expands its feature set, including expanding the Expend account to offer additional business banking functionality.

AccountingWEB view

While the crowded expenses management market might not seem the most fertile of grounds for a new start-up, Expend represents an innovative solution to an age-old problem.

One of the key points is that the company built the finance systems itself from the ground up rather than rely on other firms’ technology – something that is much more common in the payments space.

It’s still early days for Expend, but the initial reports and feedback are good. It will be interesting to see how the take-up goes and how many other companies follow in their wake.

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