Today we’re excited to announce Soldo’s new outbound bank transfer feature, Pay Someone.

Pay Someone is a significant step forward in enhancing Soldo’s payment capabilities, giving you more payment options than ever before. With Pay Someone you can make outbound bank transfers to pay others, like employees or suppliers, right from the Soldo platform. It’s a simple yet effective payment capability that helps you manage all types of payment from a single platform. This feature sets the stage for further supplier management and payment enhancements coming later in 2024 – so watch this space!

What is Pay Someone?

Pay Someone is a new feature available in Soldo that enables quick and easy bank transfers, directly from the web or mobile app. Pay Someone supports Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) and Faster Payments Service (FPS) bank transfers. It’s perfect for out-of-pocket reimbursements, invoice payments, and more. No more switching between banking systems – saving you valuable time.

“Soldo’s ‘Pay Someone’ feature has streamlined Nuage’s payment processes, making supplier payments and fund transfers quick and seamless.

It’s become a vital tool that has helped us enhance our client services in the travel industry.” – Carl Paes, Sales Director, Nuage

How can Pay Someone help you?

Pay Someone gives you more payment options to help with day-to-day business spending:

• Easy reimbursement: Reimburse employees for out-of-pocket expenses with ease. As part of our Pay Someone capability, we have developed a dedicated, embedded workflow into our existing expense management process. This means that reimbursement can be initiated swiftly in Soldo, without switching to other systems.
• Make payments to any third-party: Pay any person or organisation quickly through Soldo. When it’s not possible to use your Soldo card, Pay Someone can be used as an alternative to pay supplier invoices or make one off external payments. You can even set up and save regular payees to make future payments efficiently.
• Proactive cash flow management: Easily transfer funds back from Soldo to your business bank accounts to help you manage your ongoing cashflow.

Bank transfers made via Pay Someone can come from your Main Wallet or from ringfenced funds assigned to Company Wallets. This ensures transactions are correctly allocated to the right teams or projects.

Who can use Pay Someone?

Pay Someone is only available to customers who are using our new plans “Standard, Plus or Enterprise”.

It can be used by Super Admins looking for a straightforward way to make outbound payments. For more details on how the feature works, please see our Help Centre FAQs.

How do I learn more?

To learn more about our new plans, please see our plan and pricing overview or click here to get a 30 day free trial.

If you’re a current customer and want to find out more information, please speak to customer support or your account manager or customer success manager.

Simple and safe spending shouldn’t be a challenge for care providers, but with shift working, high staff turnover and multiple locations, the backdrop to care spending is far from straight forward. The result, distributing and tracking funds can be an arduous task.

Add to this multiple ways of spending, petty cash, credit cards, possibly carer cards, it can be incredibly challenging to have full visibility and control over where your money is being spent.

You want carers to be focused on caring, not worrying about a missing receipt or how they are going to get the funds in the first place. You also, as a manager or finance team member, don’t want the admin and hassle that comes with it. Straightforward spending and reconciliation help you to focus on moving the business forward, finding ways to drive efficiencies and improve the bottom line.

This is where Soldo comes in. It provides a safer, more flexible alternative.

Complete spending controls

You decide how you distribute your prepaid cards, whether it’s to individuals, homes or teams, you can set it up to reflect your business structure and ways of spending. Budgets and rules can be customised in the platform, allowing you to decide where the cards can be used, giving you control over where and how money is being spent.

Once that’s in place you can simply move money where it is needed whilst having a real-time view of spending across the entire business. Combine with the deep insights the platform offers, you are able to stay on top of spending.

Employee independence

With proactive controls, teams spend money responsibly without involving finance. You can decide who can spend what, and where, ensuring your people have money when they need. Funds can be distributed between carers, homes or teams within a few clicks.

Easy expense management

Expense reporting can be done on the go, removing the need for receipts to be kept in a petty cash tin. The time saved on this task or the chasing that ensues can be spent focusing on strategic activities, such as opening new locations, streamlining suppliers etc. With automation and integrations with Sage, Quickbooks and Xero, manual data entry is reduced, removing inaccurate records, missed VAT claims and potential compliance issues. You also have an up-to-date view on spending data.

How it could work for your business

There are 3 main use cases for how you can segregate or distribute funds across your care service:

Give cards to service users

Instead of using service users’ personal bank cards, assign Soldo cards instead. Set weekly or monthly budgets in advance and give families a clear view of all transactions.

Give cards to care givers

Got carers on the road? No problem, give them a card with the money they need – all locked down by rules, so it can only be spent with pre-approved suppliers.

Give cards to each home

Move your money to any location, instantly. Cash can be managed from anywhere and distributed to anyone with the click of a button, whilst you have piece of mind that the money can only be spent with approved suppliers.

Have a different use case? Give us a call and we’ll work with you on how to solve it.

If you’re looking for a way to gain visibility and control over spending, whilst adding a layer of security, get in touch with us today. We’d love to help with your spend management.

Before the lockdown landed, Soldo took Dough Stories on tour around the UK to speak with founder and investors. Hosted in London, Bristol, Birmingham and Cambridge, the dinners were a chance for founders and investors to lean in, listen, question and be challenged, on the topic of raising and managing money.

We spoke with over 100 founders and investors from across the country, with representatives from Episode 1, Connect Ventures, Borrow a Boat, Feedr, Petalite, Fluence, Bristol Private Equity, Boost & Co., and Tumelo. They all shared one common perspective – starting a company is tough and scaling a company is even tougher.

In a survey of decision-makers at 250 start-ups, commissioned by Soldo, seven-in-10 said they found the funding process easy but 95 percent said they struggle when making spending decisions. For those who struggled to secure investment, one of the biggest challenges was being able to provide investors with a financial forecast (35 percent).

The dinners provided a forum for founders and investors learn from each other when it comes to raising and spending, because sharing knowledge is the only way to succeed and grow. Conversations were centred around financial transparency, burn rates, and diversity and inclusion.

Financial transparency: How much is too much?

There is no blueprint as to how transparent founders should be with their investors post raise, and as a consequence we found a large divergence in transparency levels. Some founders provided financial metrics to their investors by request while others provided investors with 24/7 access to all of their financials.

Reasoning for reduced transparency centred around the fact that that internal north star metrics being worked towards by founders are not necessarily those shared with investors, and can actually be at odds with the metrics investors care about. Increased transparency was championed for allowing investors to provide greater support to founders, negating the need for ‘unexpected, difficult conversations’.

Within teams, there was agreement that financial transparency can build resilience but can also cause unnecessary stress without the potential of significant upside return for non-founding team members. Consequently, there was a large disparity in opinion on how far down financial transparency goes within companies. Some founders only provided financial knowledge on a need to know basis, others were 100% transparent right down to every salary and share option. An interesting conversation was had about the merits and downfalls of the Gravity Payments’ CEO, who recently introduced a $70k minimum salary for all his employees.

Handling burn rate panic

Raising money is a commitment to spend money, but knowing when and what to spend on is a common challenge for founders. With raising funds being a time-consuming process, taking founders away from the day-to-day running of the businesses, it’s important for founders to plan ahead to avoid burn rate panic.

Founders agreed that budgeting at least six months in advance is essential, but also echoed the sentiment that agility is just as crucial when it comes to adjusting spend. In sharing their spending regrets, there was almost unanimous agreement that it is common for founders to overspend on conferences, office space and consultants.

The most significant overspend was bad hires, wasting not just money but also significant time. Unsurprisingly, founders agreed that the best spend is on good hires and on product development. There was a realisation that little is done to support founders, either by investors or by each other with regards to advice on where and where not to spend.

“Diversity is being invited to the party; Inclusion is being asked to dance.”

It has been widely proven that better decisions come from more diverse teams – both within investment and startup teams. However, research from Deloitte also highlights that unless diverse teams also feel included within a firm, they will not perform to their best abilities. An increase in individuals’ feelings of inclusion translates into an increase in perceived team performance (+17%) and decision-making quality (+20%).

There was a consensus that venture capital firms have a responsibility to have clear initiatives to promote diversity in their firms. They also have a unique opportunity to positively impact the companies in which they invest and society at large with regards to diversity and inclusion. It was suggested that VCs should:

• Work harder to look beyond traditional channels for deal sourcing
• Review D&I policies every time they raise a new fund
• Restructure incentives to not discriminate against team members who have been out of work due to paternity leave
• Include a clause in their Term Sheets that says that companies need a diversity and inclusion policy in place within six months of investment
• Guide portfolio companies on building an inclusive culture.

It was suggested that founders of startup/scaleup companies should:

• Appoint a Diversity & Inclusion champion
• Review HR policies including parental leave
• Foster a culture of inclusion for diverse talent
• Provide accessible offices to wheelchair users, lactation rooms for new mothers, and prayer room facilities
• Offer unconscious bias training
• Introduce more flexible working hours

The Soldo team is extremely grateful to all the founders and investors who came together to share their experiences of raising and spending money to grow their game changing businesses. There’s was lots of food, lots of laughs and lots of learnings.

Watch founders get into the nitty gritty, the ups and downs of raising and spending dough in Soldo’s new video series Dough Stories live now.