Expense-Policy & Card-Controls Advisory

A small advisory helping companies set expense policies and card controls can work, but only if you sell judgment, not setup.

There are tons of spend-management tools out there. But there's a real gap the research keeps pointing to: buying cards is easy, deciding who can spend, what needs sign-off, and how each transaction matches your books is not.

The clearest reason people want this now is fraud and control. The ACFE 2024 report found expense-reimbursement fraud in 13% of occupational-fraud cases, with a median loss of EUR 46,000 that went undetected for 18 months. Companies under 100 employees got hit 20% of the time.

Keep it project-based, tied to specific tools, and run by an accountant. Vendors already do basic onboarding for free, so you have to sell something they can't: neutrality, real policy design, and helping people actually change how they work.

Launch it as a fixed fee with an optional review retainer. A one-off policy project doesn't keep paying you by itself.

• Pleo runs about €11-18 per user per month if you sign up yourself. Multi-entity support starts around €99 per month billed annually.
• Spendesk is aimed at big companies. The research says it's overbuilt for small businesses.
• The research knocks Payhawk for slow onboarding and a lot of manual setup. Qonto's expense feature is too basic to handle approvals by role.
• Referrals from accountants are the clearest way to get clients, per the research. And a lot of small companies don't trust onboarding run by the vendor selling them the tool.