How European Energy automates expense reports at scale with Pleo

A company with a progressive and ambitious mission as European Energy, which constructs wind and solar farms to help climate change, shouldn’t have bureaucratic processes and policies slowing them down. Their finance teams are aware of that, which is why they implemented Pleo.

A lot of companies claim their ambitions are to make world a better place. But very few of them actually actively contribute it to directly as European Energy does. Founded back in 2004, with the vision to be a significant force in the global transition to a fossil free society, the company has already installed and invested in more than 1 GW wind and solar farms.

Expanding across 11 countries, from Denmark to Brazil, with more than 100 employees today contributing to company’s fast growth, their finance and operations team is always looking for the best new ways to make their organisation run smoother and make sure employees feel happy and productive.

Fighting climate change (and expense reports)

European Energy constructs wind and solar farms all around the world, which means their employees are scattered on various projects. As the number projects and employees grew, so did the number of expenses. And as it often occurs, the finance team experienced a very common pain trying to automate one of the most annoying tasks for employees.

“Expense reporting is a hassle for every company in the world,” says Mikael Thusgaard Johansson, Finance Controller at European Energy. Working in finance for more than 10 years in companies of different sizes and industries, he has seen and tried a lot of solutions on the market, but always ended up with the same conclusion.

“We had a student assistant three times a week. He was only focused on sitting and doing expense reporting,” Mikael explains the manual way their finance team was managing expenses. Like most companies today, they had to manually input lines of cost from classic company cards data into Navision, their ERP system, at the end of each month. This quickly became unsustainable for their modern and forward-thinking finance team, as they wanted to be faster and more productive, so they decided to find a better way of doing things.

Pleo: finally a better way to manage expenses

When Mikael stumbled upon Pleo, it immediately caught his attention.
It was not only because he found it through channels that are traditionally not used by financial products. He saw Pleo questioned the traditional way of doing expenses in general. By blending company cards, expense reporting, spending analytics and receipt reconciliation into one product, he quickly became interested.

“I could quickly see Pleo is a company that is moving things forward and listening to what is needed by companies, not settling with the standard way of doing things like most solutions out there are doing.”

“Almost everything is automated now”, says Mikael when explaining the benefits of Pleo had for European Energy, with
excitement. With Pleo, their finance team can now track all spending data in real-time from Pleo, including receipts and projects while automatically exporting this data to their ERP system, saving them a lot of manual work, so they can focus on more important things that their complexed climate change projects actually require.

“Pleo have enabled us to get a much better overview and control all our travel and client related expenses,” ended Mikael and highlighted the benefits Pleo had for the entire organisation: “It saves time for all our employees with company cards and at the same time we’ve got rid of all paperwork – everything is digital now!”