Digital receipts platform Flux and expensing provider Pleo have announced a partnership that promises to deliver the UK’s first fully-automated, invisible expensing experience for businesses.

Once activated, Flux will send real-time, itemised digital receipts direct to Pleo when cardholders shop online or in-store at Flux-supported retailers using their Pleo cards. This process is automatic and invisible to the end-user and Flux does not require photos, QR codes or any use of optical character recognition (OCR) technology to generate and deliver its digital receipts. Pleo users will not need to photograph a paper receipt or upload an email.

In a press release, the two firms say that SMEs collectively lose over £8bn each year to the administrative burden created by business expense management, and £1.9bn is lost to unauthorised or inflated expense claims. By streamlining the expensing process, Flux digital receipts are designed to save Pleo’s customers time and make it easier to claim back expenses.

Flux has already delivered more than 1.5 million digital receipts to-date for customers across the UK. Expense management is a new market for the London-based fintech and will see Flux’s technology introduced to businesses using Pleo up and down the country.

The expensing solution will be launched later this year.

“Both Pleo and Flux have a shared common value - to remove unnecessary friction in an increasingly digital world,” said Luke Richardson, director of Brand and Communications at Pleo. “For us, that’s with business spending.”

“Expensing is a natural partnership for us as a digital receipts company - we’ve all experienced the pain of trying to manage expenses and reconcile accounts,” said Roisin Levine, head of Banks at Flux. “We’re incredibly excited to be working with Pleo to bring the UK its first fully-automated, invisible expensing solution, and we look forward to rolling this out by Q4 2020 to the 7,000 companies using Pleo in the UK.”