When it comes to building a startup, you need several key ingredients to cultivate business success: a one of a kind idea, a competent team, a unique market demand — the list goes on! But the most fundamental challenge faced by many startups today is and will always be money. According to Teamwork, “when cash flow issues hit a startup, they can hit hard, delaying important progress like rolling out products, hiring key staff, or fitting new offices.” And we couldn’t agree more!

It may be a complicated subject matter to discuss but let’s face it, without money, a startup can only go so far – no staff to hire, no products and services to render, and essentially no big and groundbreaking ideas to materialise. Moreover, money is a complex problem that encompasses various aspects of startup growth: from acquiring much-needed capital to developing a healthy and sustainable cash flow. Startups have a lot on their plate in managing finances and ensuring that the company can simplify processes without incurring unnecessary costs.

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Businesses, particularly finance teams, have several areas of responsibility to cover. These key areas are tracking and managing internal spending, bill payments, approval workflow and documenting sign-offs, and accounting reconciliation, which deals with getting data transferred into the company’s accounting software of choice. These are crucial and often complicated aspects of finance that tend to trouble businesses.

And assuming all goes well and you manage to land a large sum of investment from high profile VCs and trusted corporate partners, how exactly should you be spending your money? To get a full insider’s scoop, we spoke to Michele Ferrario, Co-Founder and CEO of the digital wealth management company, StashAway, to learn all about the inner workings of startup spending.

Scaling your company while maintaining budgetary and audit control

Different startups deal with different priorities when it comes to business spending. Some rely on building and maintaining high-level tech infrastructure while others anchor their finances with more staff members and cross-country operations. As a general rule, however, startups that want to grow and scale require a robust financial system that maintains budgetary and audit control without impeding the company’s ability to expand.

In the case of StashAway, as the company scaled from around 10 to 20 team members in one office, all the way to 200 people in five locations (Singapore, Malaysia, the Middle East and North Africa, Hong Kong, and Thailand), the number of people with the ability to spend money increased exponentially as well. Due to this, StashAway could no longer rely on a couple of credit cards, especially as the processes became bureaucratic and inconvenient.

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For Ferrario, it is crucial for companies to “set clear rules and processes for payment approvals and executions early on, as it will enable faster scaling.” Thankfully for StashAway, they called on Spenmo to help improve the way they handle their payments and internal spending, ultimately allowing the company to scale from 20 to 200. “Spenmo helped us increase the number of people that have access to a corporate card while maintaining control over the spending,” he explained. “Spenmo helped us scale the number of people that can spend money while maintaining budgetary and audit control,” Ferrario added.

Like StashAway, with teams from different parts of the region, businesses need to streamline their finance and expense policies as their companies grow. Spenmo tracks and monitors internal expenses and cross-border payments through a slew of payment services for businesses, including corporate credit cards, automated local and international bill payments, and employee claims management and payroll, all within the same dashboard.

With Spenmo, startups can save up to 200 hours of payment processing time and around US$1,000 of bank charges every month.

How Spenmo is changing the game

Spenmo is a payments software with corporate smart cards tailored to help companies have control and visibility over their expenditure. At its core, it is an end-to-end payables software that brings internal spend management, corporate cards, automated bill payments, approval workflows, and accounting reconciliation into an integrated dashboard. Not only does this benefit back-office finance teams, but it also proves to be helpful to partners and accounting firms offering their services to clients.

One particular company whose transacting power has improved significantly is Counto, a human-assisted and AI-powered virtual CFO, accounting, and payments services provider in Singapore. Counto’s simplified bill payment system (also known as CountoPay) aims to provide a seamless experience for its clients with large volumes of payables. The goal is to automate the entire bills payment workflow from receipt of the invoice, processing the payment, and reconciling the payables between the accounting and bank data.

However, Counto’s clients struggle with the existing manual payments process, which typically involves logging into multiple online banking applications and payment platforms or going to the bank itself to process the payment. Moreover, outdated methods have resulted in a commingling of personal and business finances for Counto’s clients, which can be complicated and inconvenient. Not only does this consume a lot of time, but this also increases the risk of fraudulent and erroneous payments.

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As such, Counto opted to use Spenmo to optimise its clients’ Accounts Payable (AP) workflow by integrating their bill payment system with Spenmo’s payments API. As a result, Spenmo now supports Counto Pay in managing large volumes of client bill payments in a cost-efficient manner. As a bonus, Counto’s clients also enjoy the lowest local and overseas bill pay and instant access to physical and virtual corporate credit cards with pre-approved funds.

“The accountant login comes in handy. My team no longer has to chase multiple accounts for access, and monitoring spend across multiple clients is now effortless,” shared Ishi, the Managing Partner at Counto.

There are four key benefits to using Spenmo that could drastically improve your business spending habits:

• Control: You’ll be able to set rules and budget for spending at your company, team, and even employee level; research shows that this tactic can provide up to 30% cost savings
• Visibility: Real-time analytics of the company’s spending; always know where your money is going
• Hassle-free: No more reimbursements, paper receipts, and manual reconciliations; research shows that this can help save between 30 mins to 2 hours per employee per month
• Seamless Payments Reconciliation: With Spenmo’s advanced integration with accounting software, liabilities are easily reconciled with payables in your accounting books almost instantly

Improving business spending helps your business scale

Improving your business’ spending practices involves company-wide participation – from the c-suite to the department team members. As a business owner, you’ll need a tool that optimises team spending across different departments and regions. Doing so will empower each member to contribute to the company’s growth. Whether you are a business with a back-office team, or a firm managing several clients, you’ll find Spenmo useful for scaling your business. And there are certainly many ways to improve your spending, and Spenmo is here to help you. The company recently raised a whopping US$34M Series A funding, and they have big plans in store to further help businesses today. For more information, visit their official website at https://spenmo.com/.

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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by Spenmo

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