Mastering Spend Management: Pleo Pocket

Business spending comes in all different shapes and sizes, and sometimes a company card doesn’t quite cut it.

You know, things like mileage costs. Reimbursing employees who had to dip into their own pockets. Taking account of work cards accidentally used for personal purchases. 

In this blog post, we’ll go through all there is to know about Pocket, breaking down each feature that admins can find in their Pleo apps. Already onboarded? Here’s the complete rundown on how to get started with Pocket.

So, what can Pocket do for you?

Pain-free reimbursements 

Reimbursing your team for out-of-pocket spending is a pain for everyone involved. Your finance team probably has to deal with the impact reimbursements have on the payroll process, or just the general inefficiency of chasing team members for receipts.

Not to mention your employees who are left waiting for weeks, maybe even months, to get back what they’re owed — be that £3 or £300. 

With Pocket, you can manage and track all out-of-pocket spending and reimburse your team with just the tap of a button. 

Let’s say someone from your Sales team paid out-of-pocket for a train ticket to a conference, they can then add the total amount to their Pocket expenses along with their receipt. 

Approving your teams’ reimbursements

So Pleo admins are always in control, be that team leads or finance, Pocket allows for an approval workflow for each reimbursement if you need. Once a reimbursement has been signed off, your team member will receive a confirmation notification to let them know how much has been transferred back to their personal bank account.

Before, users could only be reimbursed via card transfer. But we’ve added a new functionality to make it more accessible to our users. As well as reimbursements via card, employees can now reimburse themselves via bank transfer, too.

Bank transfer mode ensures that everyone is able to be reimbursed. Now, you won’t have to worry about making ends meet until payday because you coughed up the cash for that client meal. Just reimburse yourself and watch the money you’re owed automatically appear in your bank account.

Does your team make multiple out-of-pocket purchases? If that's the case, they can automatically reimburse themselves. To give you an extra peace of mind, you can set individual spending limits for card and Pocket expenses, so you don’t have to approve every single expense. 

Keep track of all your teams’ mileage 

Whether your company relies on travel or only has a few people travelling for work, fuel cost quickly adds up and becomes tricky to manage — there’s different rates and piles of lost receipts.

As a Pleo admin, our Mileage feature lets you track how much is owed to people on your team who are out on the road.

Once someone from your team has completed their journey, they can add in the starting and finishing addresses of the trip via the Pleo app. We’ll work out the distance travelled and how much is owed based on the default compensation rate you set. 

Rest assured, if something doesn’t look right, maybe there was a typo or a manual entry issue, a Pleo admin can edit the travel date, distance travelled and rate.

Manage your teams’ ATM cash withdrawals

In an ideal world, your team would be able to cover all your work expenses using their Pleo card, but we also know that some merchants only accept cash.

In these situations, Pocket allows your team to withdraw cash from an ATM using their Pleo card and automatically records what they spend. After withdrawing cash, their Pocket balance will reflect the amount taken from the ATM machine and this will show up as money "owed to the company".

If your team withdrew £100 using their Pleo card, they can work their way back to a zero balance by adding purchases they’ve made with that cash — be that a client dinner or train ticket. 

For the odd occasion where a small difference in money can remain in your teams’ balance, we’ve created a thorough help page to answer all these questions. Be that withdrawing cash in a foreign currency or dealing with added ATM fees — read more on this here. 

Correct those accidental personal purchases

We get it, accidents happen. Maybe your team has their Pleo card details stored on an ecommerce site or maybe they mistakenly used their Pleo card via Apple Pay to buy something personal at the weekend. 

With Pleo, you can sort this kind of mishap in seconds. Your team just needs to mark that expense as a private purchase in the app. This will then update the amount that’s “owed to the company” so there’s no frantic panicking or worrying about how they’re going to repay this. Phew!

As we become the go-to spending solution, Pocket is yet another example of how companies from various industries can rely on Pleo to clean up their expense management game across the board — from mileage and fuel reimbursements to ATM withdrawals. 

Any questions left unanswered? Take a look at our FAQ page or get in touch with our proactive customer service.