NoBull SaaS

What does Pleo do?

Tool: Pleo

The Tech: Spend Management

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Their Pitch

Smart spend management you can trust.

Our Take

It's company credit cards that actually track receipts automatically. Finance teams get real-time spend visibility instead of chasing employees for crumpled receipts at month-end.

Deep Dive & Reality Check

Used For

  • +**Your team submits receipts 3 weeks late with coffee stains** → Employees snap photos instantly, OCR reads everything, syncs to QuickBooks automatically
  • +**You're paying for 15 SaaS tools but only using 8** → AI flags duplicate subscriptions and unused services, saved one startup 2% of total spend
  • +**Month-end reconciliation takes your finance person 2 full days** → Auto-matching transactions cut reconciliation from hours to 10 minutes
  • +Cards lock to specific vendors (AWS-only cards) - prevents the intern from buying lunch on the cloud hosting budget

Best For

  • >Finance teams spending 20+ hours/week chasing receipts and reconciling expenses
  • >Growing companies drowning in forgotten SaaS subscriptions and AWS bills
  • >European startups tired of expense spreadsheets and manual reimbursements

Not For

  • -Teams under 10 people — card fees cost more than the manual tracking you're avoiding
  • -US-focused companies — built for Europe, currency conversion fees add 2-3% on transactions
  • -Large enterprises needing heavy customization — this works great until you hit 250+ employees

Pairs With

  • *QuickBooks (where all your Pleo transactions sync automatically so your accountant stops asking for spreadsheets)
  • *NetSuite (for advanced reconciliation, though premium sync costs extra and users complain about surprise bills)
  • *Slack (where you'll get notifications about receipt uploads and spending limit approvals)
  • *AWS (common use case is AWS-locked cards so developers can't accidentally spend the cloud budget on lunch)
  • *Xero (popular with European startups, 15-30 minute setup for basic sync)

The Catch

  • !OCR fails on 20-30% of faded receipts, so you'll still do manual entry (adds 15-30 minutes per failed scan)
  • !Pricing starts reasonable but interchange fees and premium integrations can double your costs as you scale
  • !Cards are vendor-locked by design, which sounds great until you need one quick purchase from somewhere new

Bottom Line

Company cards that snap receipts instantly and sync to your accounting software so finance stops playing detective.