Using Pleo-Toonen Reizen
How Toonen Reizen cut expense processing from hours to seconds with Pleo
The challenge
Toonen Reizen is a Dutch touring coach company with a fleet of around 30 buses and more than 50 employees, including drivers who criss-cross Europe every week. Paris, Spain, Italy — you name it. On any given trip, drivers are paying for fuel, tolls, parking, food, and accommodation. That’s a lot of spending, happening far from the office.
Managing it all fell to a finance team of two people, one of whom is Joey Mahulette, Finance Business Partner. Before Pleo, the process looked like this: drivers left with an envelope of cash, came back with receipts (ideally), and finance picked things up from there… manually.
The cracks started showing fast:
100 transactions, one very long hour
Every receipt was checked and manually entered into the accounting system. Around 100 transactions took nearly an hour. With trips running constantly, the admin load weighed heavily on a two-person finance team.
Cash envelopes as a “control system”
Drivers received cash before trips and returned with leftovers and receipts. When the numbers didn’t match, the investigation began. And when receipts went missing on a long European run, it was often a case of “take our word for it.”
Visibility that arrived weeks too late
Expenses became clear only after the trips ended. That meant finance couldn’t act on anything in real time, only after the fact.
Drivers acting as bookkeepers
Asking drivers to track paper receipts across multiple countries — while doing their actual job — wasn’t fair to them, and it wasn’t working.
The solution
For a company where employees are constantly moving, the solution needed to work everywhere, not just at a desk. What won Joey over about Pleo was exactly that: the combination of simplicity for drivers and real-time control for finance.
“Drivers can now upload receipts using the app and we immediately see the transaction. It reduces manual work and gives us much better visibility into spending.”
— Joey Mahulette, Finance Manager
The results
The shift has been tangible—for finance, for drivers, and for the business.
Manual work down to seconds
The finance team spends far less time correcting data and chasing receipts, and more time on monitoring trends, challenging unusual costs, and guiding spend while trips are still in motion.
Fewer missing receipts, better compliance
Drivers find it easy to simply snap a picture of the receipt, which means they actually do it, and that makes all the difference for the finance team.
No post-trip surprises
Transactions are now visible the moment they happen. If something looks unusual, the team can flag it immediately, not weeks later.
Finance doing (actual) finance work
With admin pressure off the table, the team can focus on monitoring spending trends, analysing patterns, and contributing to decisions that directly impact the business.
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