French startup Spendesk just raised $9.9 million (€8 million) from Index Ventures with Michael Benabou, Laurent Asscher and Showpad cofounders Louis Jonckheere and Pieterjan Bouten also participating. Spendesk is a service that combines prepaid cards with an expense report solution.
After signing up, each employee receives a personal card. Companies can top up their global Spendesk account with a normal transfer to a good old IBAN. Then you can define different sets of policies to limit your employees’ expenses.
As for employees, Spendesk centralize all expenses in a modern interface. You can track your expenses and upload receipts. Spendesk will pre-fill information and help you match invoices with expenses thanks to a mobile scanning feature. You can finally export all expenses to a format that is compatible with accounting software.
“We are building a platform that simplifies your company’s operational spending — supplier payments, corporate expenses, card expenses,” Spendesk founder and CEO Rodolphe Ardant told me. “Everything goes through Spendesk with validation processes and the ability to control everything. Behind the scene, we’re automizing most of the tasks for the financial team. It makes them save an incredible amount of time every day.”
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Spendesk works in EUR, USD or GBP. Employees who have to pay in cash or with another card can now add third-party expenses too. When it comes to online subscriptions, you can easily track and allow some subscriptions before it goes out of hand thanks to virtual cards.
Most importantly, many European companies still don’t hand out corporate cards. Spendesk makes it easy to get started so that your employees don’t waste time waiting for someone’s approval. Spendesk lets you set up a clear approval process for the most unusual purchases in the Spendesk interface.
So far, Spendesk has managed over $49 million (€40 million) in transaction volume. 600 companies are using it. And the best part is that you feel like you’re not really paying anything to use Spendesk as the company is charging you on your Spendesk account.
