Using Pleo – Vistair
How Pleo gave Vistair greater spending control and visibility than ever before
The challenge
Vistair is on a mission to modernise and simplify flight operations, aviation engineering and aviation safety, fuelled by real-time, data-informed decisioning. Initially founded in 1997, fast-forward to now and a lot has changed along the way. They’ve accelerated at speed since transforming into a tech company in the last five years.
“Huge data sets exist in aviation, and in moments when an engine is on fire or something else has gone wrong with the plane, people need the right bits of information quickly, and they don't want to be sifting through huge data sets. So, that's what we do, wherever those people are in the world.”
With a lean finance team, a lot of the challenges arise in the time it takes to complete manual admin which creates inefficiencies. To shed some light on life before Pleo, Johnny Bray, CFO at Vistair, shared some insights into the challenges he and the team were facing:
Endless spreadsheets and mountains of lost receipts
Every month, Vistair’s finance team would have to deal with up to 15 sheets of Excel with hundreds of attached receipts and a note saying “Oops, sorry I forgot to submit these expenses.” Trying to predict what spend was coming through at end-of-month was a huge part of the finance team’s day-to-day.
Lack of spending visibility
With remote workers and offices around the world, Vistair’s finance team had very little spending oversight. And to top it off, the team was growing by 50%, so keeping an eye on outgoings was messy business to say the least. Efficiency is at the heart of how Vistair do business, and before Pleo, that wasn’t always possible.
Struggling to gain accurate data
With the majority of employees tediously (not to mention messily) uploading their receipts to a spreadsheet at the end of the month, this left little room for the finance team to work with data and strategically think about business spending. Instead, the lean team was sifting through endless lines of data — when their time could be better spent elsewhere.
The solution
An all-in-one platform that captures all company spend in one process, giving the finance team valuable insights and visibility over past and potential future costs.
“Before Pleo, we didn’t have good visibility over what was spent. We could do it, but it would take a person sifting through an Excel spreadsheet, working out different ways of cutting the bits of information. It was highly inefficient, that’s something I’m glad to be rid of.” Johnny Bray, CFO at Vistair.
The results
Vistair’s philosophy is to “keep it really simple,” and it’s for exactly this reason that Pleo has so easily slotted into the company’s culture and business. According to Johnny, all of the Vistair team has massively benefited from using Pleo, and this has only freed up time for the finance team to focus on the work that really matters. Johnny outlined just a few results from switching from spreadsheets to seamless spend management:
Greater control and visibility
For Vistair, having full visibility of expenditure, including reporting and data dashboards, meant it was very easy to understand what was going on everyday. As a growing company, Vistair has the opportunity to make mistakes. But being able to see things in real-time means mistakes don’t get out of hand. With Pleo’s monitoring controls, they’ve had full control over spending as it happens.
Becoming a digital company
Pleo was part of Vistair’s journey to becoming a fully digital company after adopting our tool over two years ago. “It’s absolutely been a part of our digital transformation,” Johnny explained. Following Vistair’s philosophy of not overcomplicating the simple stuff, Pleo was a complete no-brainer company-wide.
Teams feeling empowered
Pleo helps Vistair empower people across the business to make purchases quickly and efficiently, all while finance stays in control. Instead of building up hundreds of out-of-pocket expenses and having to wait to be reimbursed, Pleo gives employees the freedom to spend when they need to.
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