Pleo Launches Bills to Simplify Invoice Payments for UK Companies

Fintech scale-up Pleo, which offers simplified expense management tools and smart company Mastercards, today launches Bills – an easy way to consolidate, track and pay business-to-business (B2B) bill payments and a supplier’s terms of service. With free-of-charge domestic transfers, businesses will also benefit from additional, vital cost-savings when paying invoices using Pleo Bills.

Bills will help companies build new levels of financial resilience and accountability by digitising and streamlining business invoice workflows and payment. Employees forward invoices to a dedicated Pleo Bills email address, with the documents then automatically processed using Pleo’s OCR technology. Each bill is cross-referenced for duplication and validated for authenticity before being approved for payment – all via the Pleo platform.

In addition to invoice automation, customers will also benefit from the following features:

• Approval flow transparency and control for admins – including verification of suppliers, an entire overview of Bill agreements, and processing of payments either immediately or on a scheduled date that benefits business cashflow

• Free domestic transfers – Bills is the first, all-in-one invoice tracking and payment solution with free GBP to GBP domestic transfers – a crucial feature for UK businesses with multiple supplier relationships at stake.

Bills provides a level of visibility that ensures all stakeholders involved in a bill’s payment lifecycle – from initial recipients through to bookkeepers – have full accountability of its status. Pleo’s recent customer survey found that, despite 30% of businesses admitting to paying invoices late at least once a year,  55% of admins still process and pay invoices manually – leaving room for human error and a lack of transparency.

Bills eliminates these issues, allowing businesses to foster important supplier relationships in a timely fashion, circumventing overly complicated and time-intensive processes typically associated with B2B billing.

Traditionally, accounting departments and accountancy firms are responsible for manually allocating supplier accounts, authorising bank payments by the requested date, and then cross-checking with the right individuals to ensure payments are fulfilled – all of which impacts bookkeeping. Bills streamlines the invoice payment chain, eliminating time-delays and bank charges incurred with transfer fees. Integration with accounting software including Xero, CSV exports, and QuickBooks (coming soon) also ensures the right people have an overview of payment dates and amounts, helping with financial compliance, forecasting and budgeting.

Jeppe Rindom, Co-founder and CEO of Pleo, says: “Since the Pandemic hit, Pleo has accelerated its product pipeline to activate vital financial technology features in its journey to become a central hub for companies to manage cash flow – and Bills is an example of this. We use thorough-bred insight from our clients when we create solutions, and when 66% of admins told us that they spent half their time on processing bills as well as authenticating the validity of them, it became our mission to simplify this complicated process and provide an end-to-end overview of it. Now businesses can make informed decisions and negotiate better supplier deals with the first, fully-automated bills experience.

We are at the helm of steering companies to meet their digital goals, and our trusted, reliable financial platform is helping them to build fiscally resilient companies.”