How Surrey Hills Accountancy use Pleo to win clients, save time and get rid of month-end surprises

Surrey Hills Accountancy is a firm of nine based in the Surrey Hills, UK. Founded in 2020, they are familiar with the difficulties many clients can face in uncertain times and pride themselves on establishing personal relationships with clients in order to identify their needs and adapt their offering accordingly. 

We spoke to Ben Withinshaw, Director of Surrey Hills Accountancy Limited, to learn more about how Pleo has helped them grow their practice and save their clients time.

Challenges

• Struggling with reconciliation issues and missing receipts
• Delayed Xero reconciliations
• Lengthy reimbursement procedure for the in-house team

Results

• Complete visibility for spend for both practice and clients
• Reconciliations are efficient and easy
• No more reimbursement forms needed

What challenges were you and your clients facing before Pleo?

We, like many of our clients, were struggling with reconciliation issues and missing receipts. Keeping track of all employee spend – and the ensuing paper trail – was impossible and in turn reconciliations within Xero were delayed.

Similar to us, our clients would make purchases one of two ways, either via their own company card and keeping a copy of their receipt for reconciliations or via their own personal card and then making an expense claim at the end of the month – meaning they would need to hold receipts until the end of the month. 

This was a difficult process with a long paper trail and receipts would go missing making reimbursements impossible or reconciliations difficult. With 10 client subscriptions and 350 client expenses up to the value of £60K each month, that would be a lot of receipt chasing!

How has Pleo helped solve these challenges for you and your clients?

We already used Pleo in-house so knew it was a fantastic tool for keeping track of finances – we now offer it to all clients that would benefit from it and strongly recommend they use Pleo to help keep track of expenses. 

Our ideal client is a company looking for an outsourced finance team to help fully understand their business, give advice on how to move forward and help them implement systems to improve and grow their business. As such, we recommend Pleo to clients, because it’s a very simple set-up and makes life a lot easier for both us and our clients. 

It took a matter of minutes to implement Pleo. All team members are issued a Pleo card at the beginning of their employment and have a quick 5-minute explanation on how to use it and then they are up and running. Amazingly simple! 

Clients find it extremely easy to use and have commented that the app is very efficient and saves them a lot of time. For clients who like constant visibility of their employee spending and their finances, the Pleo app is perfect as they can be notified for each purchase and ensure no more end-of-month surprises.

What has been the most significant achievement for your practice facilitated by Pleo?

Pleo has enabled us to gain happy clients, which in turn helps them refer other companies to join our practice. We then propose the use of Pleo to the new clients and in turn, this compounding effect is helping our business grow – proved by various award nominations and the continued growth through referrals. As a practice, we save a huge amount of time in-house as well as acting for our clients with Pleo.

Pleo makes our lives easier and by default our clients’ too. 

What impact has the results from working with us had on your clients?

Our clients have actively told us that Pleo has been extremely helpful in changing how they run their expenses process. They love that they now have full visibility of employee spending and are able to monitor spend caps, ensuring there are no surprises at the end of the month.

What Pleo feature is your – and your clients’ – favourite, and why?

We use the employee spending cards the most – all employees use their Pleo cards weekly if not daily. Any company expense is put onto our Pleo card along with a photo of the receipt – making it super easy to export and reconcile with Xero daily. 

We have found this really simple way to track employee spending allowances gives us total visibility of our spending – we can see what is being spent as ‘petty cash’ and where we are possibly overspending unnecessarily.

Our clients love this too; the ability to snap pictures of receipts on the go and not worry about having to keep a paper trail enables them to keep their expenses in good order, and for us as their bookkeepers to keep reconciliations up to date daily. 

And our favourite feature is Pleo Pocket. We find it extremely easy to use and love that there’s no need for employees to fill out reimbursement forms or hold on to old receipts. Again, it saves us and our clients a lot of time!