Essential Guides for Finance Leaders on Optimizing Spend Management

Introduction to DeveEnergy

DeveEnergy, a provider of maintenance, operational strategy, and contingency planning for gas turbine systems, focuses on improving efficiency and reducing costs. Their comprehensive services include Outages and Field Services, Consulting, Project Management, Owners Engineering, Parts and Equipment, and Borescope Rentals.

Challenges Faced by DeveEnergy

DeveEnergy encountered several challenges in their expense management process:

• Lack of Expense Management Platform: DeveEnergy had no dedicated platform for expense management, resulting in limited visibility and control over expenditures.
• Reliance on Personal Debit and Credit Cards: The company used personal debit and credit cards for business expenses, leading to a lack of transparency and control over company spend.
• Alignment with Lean Operations Methodology: DeveEnergy follows a Lean Operations Methodology, emphasising technology over human capital. They needed a platform that aligned with this approach.

In the energy sector, expenses can vary significantly due to the complexity of operations, the need for specialised equipment and services, and the unpredictable nature of maintenance and project-related costs. These challenges made it crucial for DeveEnergy to have a robust expense management solution in place.

Trying different expense management solutions

The key challenge DeveEnergy had to solve was the lack of visibility that came from the use of personal debit and credit cards along with a company card. This multi-card approach led to a lack of clear visibility into both individual card expenses and overall company spending.

Tomasz, Managing Director of DeveEnergy, had previously experimented with expense management solutions like Zoho Expenses and Concur:

• Zoho Expenses: Struggled with receipt recognition, leading to inefficiencies.
• Concur: Found Concur to be overly complicated and slow, making it unsuitable for Deve's needs.

Both platforms were deemed unnecessarily complicated and not user-friendly.

Comprehensive visibility offered by Pluto

Reporting gives monthly visibility of amount that flows through the company

Tomasz Tremblinski, Managing Director

Pluto's budget-controlled corporate cards prevented overspending, aligning with the company's financial management goals. In addition, Tomasz found Pluto's platform provided comprehensive visibility of all expenses, allowing the company to track and manage spending efficiently.  

Tomasz was also particularly impressed with Pluto's integration capabilities with accounting softwares.

Stunning that Pluto integrates directly with Accounting Software, it’s so much smoother, and CSV import/export means I'm living the dream.

Tomasz Tremblinski, Managing Director

‍‍Automating Expenses to complement the Lean Operations Methodology

Pluto's financial management platform perfectly complemented DeveEnergy's Lean Operations Methodology. By automating expense management processes, Pluto saved the DeveEnergy team valuable time, allowing them to focus on more impactful and enjoyable tasks within their roles. Further, the integration of comprehensive reporting and real-time data enabled informed, data-driven decision-making, crucial for lean operations.

This was another factor that helped Deve.

Other features DeveEnergy Loved About Pluto

The actual recognition of receipts works and its amazing! It’s saving me hours of work that I don’t enjoy

Tomasz Tremblinski, Managing Director

Platinum Heritage is known for providing authentic yet luxurious desert safari experiences. 

This case study discusses how Platinum Heritage improved spend management within six months with Pluto’s hybridization of cash and corporate cards.

It has the flexibility of spending cash and visibility of card spend.

Christopher Anthony, Global Business Controller

Introduction

Platinum Heritage is a leading provider of desert safaris and camps in Dubai. Their desert safaris authentically showcase different periods in Dubai's history to provide exclusive, luxurious experiences.

They have earned recognition for their commitment to authenticity, receiving prestigious awards such as the World Travel Award for the Middle East's Leading Desert Safari Company. 

With plans to expand into Saudi Arabia, Platinum Heritage continues to uphold its mission of providing unforgettable desert experiences while preserving Dubai's heritage. 

Petty Cash and Corporate Cards Lacked Real-Time Visibility  

As the company grew, its petty cash transactions increased substantially. Even when it tried replacing petty cash with corporate cards, there was a lack of real-time visibility.

With petty cash, the growing number of transactions resulted in an increased administrative burden. The operations teams had to maintain an imprest system and manually manage receipts, including storing, recording, approving, and reimbursing expenses.

Contrarily, with corporate cards, the company received the bank statement at the end of the month. This meant that expenses were being checked and not approved. Also, with a single card being used by everyone, it was difficult to track each function’s expense.

We wouldn’t know until the statement turned up at the end of the month what had been spent and where.

Christopher Anthony, Global Business Controller

How Pluto Provided Both Real-time Visibility and Flexibility 

Platinum Heritage wanted an enhanced spend management system—reduced cash transactions and increased real-time transparency. 

Pluto helped it achieve these goals within 6 months with the following solutions:   

Physical and Virtual Corporate Cards

Unlike traditional business credit cards, Pluto corporate cards not only helped minimize cash transactions but also provided real-time visibility. 

Instead of a shared business card, Platinum Heritage could issue unlimited budget-controlled corporate cards that facilitated detailed insights. They no longer had to track or second-guess who spent what, where, and why. 

We can go into an individual card user spent and see exactly how the money was spent effectively in real time.

Christopher Anthony, Global Business Controller

WhatsApp Receipt Capture

Pluto also helped simplify and improve visibility on the accounting and receipt management process.

Earlier, the team religiously collected the receipts and waited till the end of the week to process them. However, with Pluto, each transaction triggered a WhatsApp notification, reminding employees to upload the receipt then and there. These receipts were directly attached to the respective expenditures on the platform, making it easier to track and report from a single platform. 

It simplifies things phenomenally because it’s easier to just take a photograph of the receipt before you even fold it up and put it into the wallet.

Christopher Anthony, Global Business Controller

Digitized Petty Cash Management System

From handling thousands of cash expenses manually to getting all the information on a single platform, Pluto simplified petty cash management.

Before Pluto, the team collected all receipts and managed an imprest system which became an administrative burden. 

After Pluto, employees were issued dedicated corporate cards. In this way, the team could track the expenses in real time. Moreover, WhatsApp integration prompted employees to upload receipts for each transaction, simplifying the accounting system. 

Platinum Heritage successfully created a digital petty cash system. 

Rather than waiting until the end of the week to collect enough receipts, you can actually see the money as it goes.

Christopher Anthony, Global Business Controller

No More Debate Between Petty Cash and Corporate Cards

Platinum Heritage wanted to reduce cash usage and replace it with card transactions for enhanced transparency. It was looking for a solution to track money with ease. 

Pluto not only proved to be a better spend management tool but also provided a sweet spot between petty cash and corporate cards.

It provided the flexibility of cash without taking away the control and visibility cards offer. And unlike cards that fail to give complete context in real time, it helped them track the what, who, where, and why of expenses. 

In a nutshell, Pluto revolutionized spend management for Platinum Heritage with increased visibility of the cash spent. 

We haven’t had a single transaction that when it’s received and gone through the approval process that we’ve said, oh my god, that shouldn’t have been spent.

Christopher Anthony, Global Business Controller

Keyper is a leader in PropTech innovation in UAE. In this article, we talk about Keyper’s innovative model & how they leveraged Pluto to get to optimal spend management. Gabriel García Leyva shares his insights. 

Always at the end of this month we used to get these huge groups of receipts to process… but now that we have a system that allows us to process in real time ahead of the month end everything becomes more powerful and controlled for the team

Gabriel García Leyva

Introduction 

Positioned at the crossroads of proptech and fintech, Keyper has emerged as a disruptor in the Dubai real estate sector. Their flagship product, "Rent Now Pay Later," gives tenants the flexibility to pay their rent in monthly installments via credit card. In contrast, with “Upfront Rent” landlords get their annual rent in a single upfront payment. This dynamic model is supported by Keyper's advanced property management team, duly licensed by the Dubai Land Department.

An article published by Gulf News states a quote from Omar Abu Innab, co-founder & CEO of Keyper:

“Traditional check payments are outdated, prone to errors, and do not provide a good user experience for tenants or landlords. We designed our RNPL service to address these pain points and to enable customers, tenants and landlords, to better manage their finances with ease.”

This innovative model positions Keyper as a leader in proptech innovation.

The Challenges: Keeping Up with Keyper’s Growth & Pace of Innovation

While Keyper was scaling and evolving, there was a pressing need to have a robust system in place that could offer real-time tracking and insights into their financial operations.

Operational efficiency is the backbone of modern businesses, especially in rapidly evolving sectors like Property Technology. For Keyper, the challenge was fourfold:

• Efficiently handling and tracking petty cash without manual intervention.
• Ensuring transparent, accountable, and secure usage of corporate cards.
• Efficiently managing recurring subscriptions spending. 
• Effectively managing receipts & reducing time spent by finance teams on manual work. 

Handling and tracking petty cash expenses is difficult 

In our recent article on Managing Petty Cash in UAE, Guide & Tips we had shared how difficult it is to track and manage petty cash spending. 

Historically, businesses in UAE have used petty cash vouchers to keep track of their cash expenses. This was an extremely time consuming process. When you multiply these spends across multiple teams and departments, this manual process quickly eats up a large part of the months work days, is prone to errors and creates challenges in maintaining auditability. 

Gabriel also shed light on the same. He candidly shared the struggles of "counting every single receipt," emphasizing the universal sentiment that "everyone despises the petty cash process." This tedious task, prone to discrepancies and human error, was a bottleneck Keyper was keen to address.

The solution: Pluto’s petty cash digitization

Keyper found the answer in Pluto’s petty cash management solutions. Pluto eliminated the need for traditional, manual, and often error-prone petty cash systems, automating the entire process. The platform enabled real-time tracking and accountability for every Dirham across all employees and departments.

Through the integration of automation, the daily tasks of the employees & accounting team weren transformed, reducing manual efforts and elevating their work experience.

The company is now very self-efficient in managing finances across teams.. ..The receipts tracking on all of that is is now very seamlessly managed, the WhatsApp based receipt collector is super popular

Gabriel García Leyva

Recurring subscriptions need careful control

Another common financial issue that most companies face is associated with several recurring subscriptions. Companies often do not know the exact number and cost of these subscriptions and if these costs are growing with time. This lack of visibility can lead to unnecessary expenses and difficulty in managing the company's budget effectively. Companies typically use one corporate card and have all subscriptions on it without any specific limits set. This leads to uninformed increases in price of subscriptions, multiple spend across departments and more avoidable problems.

This was another huge challenge faced by Keyper.

The solution: Pluto’s smart corporate cards

With Pluto's smart budget enforced corporate cards, Keyper gained better control over recurring subscriptions. 

They were able to set specific limits for each subscription, ensuring that costs were managed effectively and  uninformed increases in prices were prevented. This helped Keyper optimize their budget and streamline their expense management process.

Pluto saves finance teams time as well as money

With Pluto's corporate cards and petty cash management solutions, Keyper has been able to give back their finance team 15+ hours every month. In addition, Pluto’s smart alerts managed to save them thousands of dollars in two different ways—by automatically rejecting unintended increases in seats across subscriptions as well as unlocking free subscriptions via complementary perks. 

What has been your favorite part about Pluto? 

For us, the main benefit of Pluto is that we don't have to think about petty cash and worry about spending at all. It runs on Autopilot and Pluto prompts us when it needs attention, so we can better focus on our core competency without the extra mental load. Another huge selling point has been the incredible customer support across the board. Everyone on the Pluto team has been extremely helpful through any questions we had.

Gabriel García Leyva

SmartCrowd is a fractionalized property investing company, a concept that democratizes property investment by allowing multiple investors to collectively own and benefit from rental income. This case study sheds light on how SmartCrowd used Pluto to streamline and optimize its expense management while managing a portfolio of over 100 properties in the UAE.

Introduction

SmartCrowd revolutionizes real estate investment in Dubai, providing an affordable and hassle-free way for individuals to invest in income-generating properties collectively. 

As MENA's first regulated crowdfunding platform, SmartCrowd simplifies the investment process, allowing users to browse pre-vetted opportunities, invest seamlessly, and track their portfolios through a digital platform. Regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA), SmartCrowd stands out for its market-leading returns, offering an average annualized return of 10.70%. 

Investors benefit from an all-digital experience, security, transparency, and a track record of consistently outperforming the real estate market.

The Challenges: Managing 100+ Properties With a Traditional Approach

SmartCrowd faced significant challenges in managing the expenses associated with a vast portfolio of properties. As the number of properties increased, the complexity of tracking payments, service charges, and government fees became overwhelming. 

They used the traditional approach to manage expenses, which included:

• Credit Cards: The company relied on a single credit card to make payments for all properties. This approach quickly exhausted the credit card and caused administrative headaches. 
• Excel Sheets: The team spent hours maintaining the Excel spreadsheets to track expenses for each property.  

This approach was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors.

The Solution: Digital Expense Management Platform 

Pluto helped SmartCrowd streamline its internal processes. SmartCrowd replaced its traditional methods and digitized its entire expense management system with Pluto and deployed following Pluto’s solution: 

1.Pluto’s Physical Corporate Cards 

SmartCrowd used Pluto’s physical corporate cards to issue separate cards to individuals for specific tasks. In the past, the company used a single credit card to make payments for all properties, including service charges and land department fees, causing administrative challenges.

With Pluto, each person had a dedicated card for specific expenses. This gave them visibility into the expenses, even on a per-property basis. Additionally, they saved about 40 hours per week, which was earlier spent on organizing Excel sheets and tracking expenses. 

It is much easier to have oversight over all the expenses… Our team saved a minimum of 5 hours per week cause making a sheet, putting the property names, then we have monthly expenses and track them.. It’s not just paying right; it’s using that information later.

Ambreen Manzoor

2.Expense Insights 

With 100+ properties to manage, SmartCrowd had a lot of expenses on a single card which later had to be categorized and tracked onto Excel sheets. 

Pluto enabled SmartCrowd to consolidate all the expenses on a digital dashboard and get detailed insights that could be tracked down per property. As a result, the team could pull out better information.

Insights help us plan how much expenses we can incur… that is very important for us because we can’t be using one property’s funds for another property, so we have to keep it separate. 

Ambreen Manzoor

Streamline Expense Management With Advanced Reporting

Pluto resulted in significant time savings for SmartCrowd, an estimated 40 hours per week, by digitizing its entire expense management system. Pluto replaced their old systems with physical corporate cards and digital expense management systems to simplify spending and tracking. SmartCrowd could easily categorize the expenses, which streamlined financial reporting for each property.

In fact, SmartCrowd looked forward to expanding its usage with separate cards and tags for each property and syncing with its accounting software.  

What Has Been Your Favorite Part About Pluto? 

Pluto has helped us a lot because we have 100+ properties now, so managing the expenses was getting really difficult… The customer experience has been good, like proactively the physical cards were given.

Ambreen Manzoor

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She was particularly impressed with Pluto's customer support team. Whenever SmartCrowd reached out for assistance, the Pluto customer support team promptly addressed its queries and provided quick solutions. This responsiveness was invaluable in ensuring a seamless experience for the finance team.

Conclusion

As SmartCrowd continues to expand its utilization of Pluto's solutions and further integrates them into its operational framework, this successful collaboration serves as a testament to the transformative impact of technological innovation in optimizing intricate financial processes within the real estate investment domain.

If you're seeking to streamline your company's expense management and revolutionize your approach to financial oversight, join the ranks of successful innovators like SmartCrowd. Sign up for Pluto today to unlock a world of simplified, efficient, and empowered expense management solutions tailored to meet your unique business needs. Experience firsthand the seamless integration, proactive support, and transformative capabilities that Pluto offers, empowering your team to focus on growth and financial success.