Pleo Debuts ‘Bills’ To Digitize SMB Invoicing

Pleo, the business expenses FinTech, is now adding invoice management features, a report from AltFi said on Wednesday (April 21).

The feature is titled Bills and will allow small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to forward their invoices to a Pleo Bills email address, where the documents are processed using optical character recognition (OCR) technology and prepared for payment. Pleo will also cross-reference the invoices duplicates and authenticity before they can be approved for payment.

Additionally, Pleo will be putting in a free GBP to GBP payment solution, which will allow businesses to pay their invoices and schedule the payments in the Bills interface, the report said.

That process used to be manual, where accountants would have to check invoices, assign them to supplier accounts, then authorize them for the right dates.

“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,” said Jeppe Rindom, CEO and co-founder of Pleo, according to the AltFi report. “When 66 percent 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.”

Finance teams have been prioritizing the digital side since the pandemic, with the conclusion many of them came to was that access to information is a paramount need.

Rajiv Ramachandran, senior vice president of product strategy and management at Coupa, said the lack of visibility had ground numerous back-office processes to a halt during the pandemic.

Invoice processing was a prime point to be digitized, with Ramachandran saying manual invoicing could be a huge detriment for SMBs with the risks like fraud and errors.