Now, because we save so much time with Spendesk, I’ve been able to shift my work focus to cost analysis and reporting.

Let's go over Francisco's Spendesk experience

The energy industry is going through rapid growth and unprecedented changes. Francisco took this opportunity and shifted his processes to better serve the people working at Powerdot. It's a resounding success for the company.

First step: streamline spend and payment processes

When Francisco Maya, Finance Coordinator at Powerdot, looks back at how his finance team used to handle spend management, he acknowledges that their system was unnecessarily complex. “Before, we used to work with 12 different Excel spreadsheets to track all the company costs.” 

"Employees submitted direct debits and supplier invoices through a Google Form and we collected those in Google Sheets divided per entity. 

We did expense reimbursements and credit card payments on different platforms. Collecting credit card receipts was especially chaotic. Employees had their own cards but it was hard to control all payments and the missing receipts.
We had a lot of Excel spreadsheets and different platforms. Now, we use just one. Spendesk has truly made our work easier.”

Luckily, Spendesk’s 7-in-1 tool means that Powerdot employees can handle all spend management in one single platform.

Managing mountains of invoices

Francisco estimates that Powerdot processes millions in invoices every month on average. Spendesk enables the team to handle them with ease:

“The OCR technology that scans the details of the invoice is life-changing for the requester.”

But that’s not the only “life-changing” feature in Spendesk, according to Francisco. 

“Another essential Spendesk feature is being able to prepare SEPA XML files to pay invoices. Two years ago when I joined I did about 20 payments per week, and now we’re processing and paying about 500 invoices per week. That would have been impossible two years ago and it is only possible today because of this feature.”

Time better spent on more important things

“Two years ago a considerable part of my job revolved around submitting invoices and then approving/reviewing invoices and expenses. Now, because we save so much time with Spendesk, I’ve been able to shift my work focus to cost analysis and reporting, which is much more interesting and challenging.”

This is what Spendesk is all about: liberating employees from burdensome admin and letting them instead focus on tasks that matter. 

Francisco understands this all too well. In fact, the entire finance team has benefitted from an image makeover thanks to Spendesk.

“The finance department is usually regarded as a very traditional function within a company. Spendesk helped us make finance processes much more attractive. This led employees to care a lot more about the finance processes…and comply with them!

Spendesk de-mystifies finance processes for non-finance employees at Powerdot, making their spend management a breeze.

A unique collaboration, aided by Spendesk

A big part of Powerdot’s costs is directed to a unique type of supplier: the providers of chargers Powerdot needs to operate their EV charging stations. This is a critical business relationship, and Powerdot decided to involve Spendesk:

“We work with this type of supplier daily as they issue us a lot of invoices and with high amounts. As such we decided to invite them to Spendesk, so they could submit the invoices for themselves. That’s been very helpful for us and for them to keep track of all the invoices they submit, to check the approval and payment status.”

With Spendesk, the supplier uploads their own invoices while Powerdot enjoys 100% transparency over the process. They save time and maintain control.

Why Spendesk?

Francisco’s team took time to research and benchmark the best solution out there for their needs.

“Last year, we started studying a lot of platforms. We wanted a company that would grow and evolve exponentially. Besides, Spendesk’s goals and policies seemed to be very aligned with Powerdot’s.”

“We understood Spendesk was betting a lot on product development and kept developing the tool. That was really important to us. We felt that with Spendesk, the platform would always be improving.”

“We needed a centralized payment tool and a platform with a simple and easy-to-use, intuitive design. And Spendesk was the answer.”