Elevating Spend-Management and Financial Control at Scale

Spendesk is a French fintech headquartered in Paris and has grown rapidly into a pan-European solution for corporate spending. The platform offers everything from corporate and virtual cards to invoice automation, budget controls and expense-reimbursement workflows.

When Spendesk started out in 2016, its mission was straightforward: transform how companies manage spending by giving finance teams real-time visibility and employees an intuitive, seamless way to spend. Today, it’s a leading spend-management platform trusted by thousands of businesses across Europe — and with its operations accelerating, it faced a new set of challenges in scaling its finance and treasury workflows.

‍

The Challenge

As Spendesk’s business and user base expanded, the finance and treasury teams encountered growing complexity. With numerous payment methods, multiple entities or subsidiaries, and high volumes of transactions, delivering timely, accurate spend-data to the right people became increasingly difficult.

Manual processes and fragmented tools slowed things down. Finance teams were spending too much time reconciling data, chasing receipts, and managing ad-hoc queries instead of focusing on strategic oversight. Meanwhile, employee spend requests and operational transactions were not getting captured or governed in a consistent, auditable way. The risk was two-fold: inefficiency in internal workflows, and reduced visibility for leadership into how and where money was being spent.

The objectives were clear: reduce the burden of manual work, streamline spend-approval workflows, enable faster data access for teams, and strengthen financial ­control without slowing down business operations.

‍

Transforming Spend-Management Across the Organization

To address these challenges, Spendesk implemented a streamlined process using Payflows as an enabler for data centralisation and workflow automation. The solution focused on creating role-based visibility and self-service tools for operational teams, while preserving finance’s governance and oversight.

Employees and budget-owners now access a unified workflow: requests, approvals, virtual or physical card allocations, receipt capture and invoice processing—all within one system. Finance automatically receives structured data, ready for analysis and compliant reporting, instead of manually assembling it. Operational teams can move faster, while finance retains remote visibility and audit readiness.

Implementation was conducted in phases, combining quick-win modules (such as card-allocation and spend-request workflows) with deeper integration into existing systems and reporting frameworks. The result: a scalable spend-process that supports growth, decentralised approvals and multi-entity complexity, without sacrificing control.

‍

The Impact

The effect of this transformation has been significant. Spendesk’s finance team reports dramatic reductions in manual effort — freeing time to focus on higher-value work like cash-flow planning, strategic budgeting and spend-analysis. Operational teams are empowered to spend efficiently within policy, with real-time visibility and approvals at their fingertips.

By centralising spend-data and automating workflows, Spendesk strengthened governance, improved audit readiness and gained clearer insight into where money is going across geographies and teams. Finance leaders now react faster, make informed decisions and support the business’s pace of growth without being constrained by outdated processes.

‍

Looking Ahead

As Spendesk continues its expansion into new markets, introduces new payment and spend-management capabilities and scales its internal operations, the finance and treasury infrastructure is now built to support rather than impede the journey. With decentralised productivity, centralised control and shared data at its core, Spendesk is primed to lead the next wave of innovation in company spend-management — enabling finance teams to be strategic rather than reactive.