How Catapult Eliminated 54 Hours of Monthly Expense Reconciliation
An international event management company was spending 60 hours every month manually reconciling Pleo expenses in Xero. Numra automated the entire process.
1,100
expenses processed per month
54
hours saved per month
90%
reduction in reconciliation time
Background
Catapult is an international event management company with a busy finance team processing a high volume of employee expenses every month across multiple projects. With expenses coming in across a wide range of categories, VAT treatments, and project codes, the reconciliation process between their expense management platform and accounting system had become a significant drain on finance resources.
The Problem
Around 1,100 Pleo transactions arriving every month, each requiring manual intervention before they could be reconciled in Xero.
Every single transaction required the same multi-step "split and delete" process in Xero: renaming the contact, creating a new line with the correct item code, applying the correct VAT treatment, allocating to the correct project, deleting the original line, and then reconciling.
VAT treatment decisions were complex and varied — dependent on transaction category, supplier location, and whether the spend was a good or a service — leaving significant room for error.
The process was consuming 50 hours per month of external bookkeeper time and a further 10 hours of the Head of Finance's time — 60 hours in total every month.
Errors were regularly slipping through, with miscoded VAT, wrong project allocations, and incorrect account codes only caught on review.
The Solution
Numra built a bespoke Pleo-to-Xero expense reconciliation agent that operates quietly in the background — Adrienne's process in Pleo remains exactly the same, and Numra handles everything that happens after export:
Automated collection of exported Pleo expenses on a scheduled basis.
Each expense transformed to meet Catapult's exact reporting requirements: correct supplier, correct project, correct VAT treatment, receipt attached, and reference formatted consistently.
Expenses delivered directly into Xero pre-filled and ready to reconcile — eliminating the split and delete process entirely.
Export status visibility in the Numra platform so the team can confirm every batch has been processed successfully.
The Results
1,100
expenses processed automatically per month
54
hours of manual finance work saved every month
Testimonial
"Our Pleo inbox was time consuming and Numra helped speed up the process. Rules and routing are now automatic and make things a lot faster and easier. Being able to look at Numra's reasoning for the transaction is also a very useful tool."
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