A Chat with Harry Rix, Founder at Purchase Card And Spend Management System: Expensemate

Expensemate is a B2B tool that is essentially a Mastercard-backed purchase card and spend management system. It streamlines the whole expense management process – from procuring, to capturing invoices and receipts, through to approval, and then reconciling transactions in accounting software.

We also offer a credit facility – which is totally unique to us – because we found a lot of our customers were in the blue-collar industry with field-based members of staff: they were having to pay out to complete jobs before they got paid for their job, so our credit facility provides them with stability.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
We have a sister business – Fuelmate – that has issued spending cards since 2007 for discount fuel purchasing. We found that there were a number of other purchases associated to employees being on the road that were causing problems: receipts for meals, travels, and hotels all still had to be reimbursed, which was causing friction from the employees and paperwork for the business.

We also discovered that there was not a lot of options in the public sector for purchase cards and then we reached out to our SME customer base to see if they faced the same challenge. Armed with that insight, we designed the Expensemate product so that individual transactions were all reconciled on one invoice, saving accounting teams often days and days of work.

And from that foundation, a core value of our business has been to listen to our customers all the time. We’re always developing our product offering depending on their needs and the world around us.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
It really made us focus on the use case for those customers who still had to go out, travel, and continue with their usual work pattern. For instance, for our customers in the maintenance and construction industries that still operated as key workers, we developed our product so that they could log transactions to particular jobs.

In the wider context, the way people now buy software and business solutions has changed – they are far more open to having digital demonstrations and purchasing software online. We’ve also found that people are embracing digital solutions and change far more now, so that’s had a very positive impact. But the pandemic hasn’t been without it’s challenges.
 

What can we hope to see from Expensemate in the future?

 
We’re an ambitious company and are always listening to our customers’ needs and that of the world around us, so we never stand still. We have a comprehensive roadmap of product developments that have come from customer feedback.

In the immediate future, we’re developing the spend management tool to be able to handle non-card-based transactions, so users can submit receipts for transactions that haven’t been completed on the purchase card.

We’re also launching a journeys feature for mileage reimbursements, where they can input their journey from A to B, specify their mode of transport and their chosen route, then be reimbursed for the cost incurred.

As for the next few years, all I can say is: we are growing.