Spenmo Blog

How the Spenmo team Manages its Payments

Written by Spenmo Team | Nov 12, 2021 1:45:00 PM
If you’ve been following us for a while now, you should have noticed by now that we always make it a point to weave in how Spenmo can come in useful for you. But have you wondered how the Spenmo team uses Spenmo?
 

Considering that the Spenmo product doesn’t discriminate across any types or sizes of business and that we want to ultimately optimize your internal processes, here we also want to walk the talk!

In this post, we will look into some of these ways and use cases of how different departments such as marketing, HR, sales, and our operational team uses Spenmo in our daily work.

1) Virtual Cards for Digital Marketing Spends

As a start-up, we want to get our word out there and our focus is on digital marketing means enabling that to happen. With multiple vendors/suppliers, marketing agencies and software subscriptions to deal with, virtual cards would be our go-to to efficiently manage all of our marketing transactions on a single dashboard.

We want to empower your employees by giving them the benefit of doubt to spend on what they think is best for the business. At the same time, we also want to avoid overspending. Virtual cards enable you to set clear and customizable limits and control.

Multiple cards can also be created and/or used for each subscription platform (e.g. A separate card for Google ads and another one for LinkedIn ads). Virtual cards also provide us with the option of applying a merchant lock to limit the use of funds specifically on a subscription platform (e.g. The virtual card only accepts payments from Facebook.)

 

2) Managing Subscriptions at Ease with SaaS

Startups today are not new to the subscription model, and even for us at Spenmo as a subscription-based software business. There is little practical sense for us to pour in heavy capital investments at the early stage of our business as we are still feeling our way around the ever-changing startup space.

We want to share with you some of these subscriptions that we have signed up for that we deem really helpful in developing our business. For E.g. Providing individual LinkedIn premium accounts for every one of our Sales team members empower them to keep a lookout and easily connect with potential customers.

Other subscriptions include task and project management tools (Miro, Figma) for our Project team, customer relationship management tools (Hubspot, Clickup) for our Sales and Performance Marketing team, and Content, SEO and Design Tools (AHREFS, Envato, Clearscope) for our Content Marketing team.

Regardless of how many or few SaaS solutions a business uses, we find that manually tracking the recurring payments and their renewal dates on a Spreadsheet just isn’t the most efficient! The sheer amount of data and bringing onboard any more than 1 contributor to update the Spreadsheet will just create more room for errors, vis-a-vis using SaaS to automate these transactions and adopt consistent formatting for the reports.

3) Local and International Payments

Our content marketing team works with freelance writers within and out of Singapore. Freelancers and vendors alike may prefer different payment methods, and this can make it cumbersome for the business to pay them individual-by-individual.

With Spenmo, we don’t waste any time keying in these payment details. Be it 1 or 1000s, the system is capable of scanning the bulk of invoices and ensuring that payments are made within the day. Wherever your managers are at – with an electronic device (or internet browser) and WiFi connection, they can approve the payments on the dashboard prior to it being processed.

At Spenmo, we have a diversified team of staff based in Singapore, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines. We understand the trouble of finding out the platform with the best exchange rate for each of these countries. That said, the Spenmo system allows us to make international transfers with 0% FX mark-up. We get the rates that you see on Google. Go global without having to break the bank!

4) Employee Expense Requests

The time employees spend to file a reimbursement (sorting out receipts, completing claims form, then compiling them in an email to get your expense approval, and more to-and-fro emails!) is the damn of their productivity!

Let’s not make their lives any more difficult, and yours as well! Through Spenmo’s expense claims interface, you can easily snap a photo of the receipt, it automatically pings your manager, and allows the manager to approve on any device. Plus, the interface is integrated with PayNow for instant transfers with just one click.

Alternatively, if you want to selectively give some teams or team members more autonomy in their spending, you can always look into corporate cards which can be pre-loaded with a budget and also customized depending on your employee’s needs.

5) Spend Analytics for Budgeting and Forecasting

In the age of VC, transparency is the name of the game for fast-growing start-ups. We want our team to be on the same page when it comes to what we are spending on and how we can quickly fix the spending when they don’t work. With the Spenmo dashboard, all transactions are made visible to every team member. This helps in better projections and budget forecasting for quarterly plans and targets. Real-time tracking of transactions on the dashboard also allows us to review our company spending anytime (Don’t bother waiting till the end of the month!) and anywhere to put a stop to fraudulent spending as soon as you notice it. Real-time spending data analytics also gives us a current overview of our company’s spending habits, which can help pinpoint and tackle high expense areas so we never overspend again.
 

6) Cash Flow Management and Accounting Book Reconciliation

To make a case for you to come on board with us to use Spenmo, we are constantly on the lookout for new partner platforms to be integrated with our system. The Spenmo-Xero partnership is an example. Spenmo integrates directly with Xero to create an end-to-end solution for payments reconciliation. With a click of a button, the payouts you made via Spenmo seamlessly flow into Xero. Even the charts are synced such that you get an accurate overview of your financial data. Consider what this means for our finance and accounting teams, they spend less time consolidating and writing monthly expense exports, and more time to do what really matters to grow the business and take it to greater heights. Now, this doesn’t end right here. Experience Spenmo yourself for free and let us know if you concur with us or not!