Secret Escapes

Secret Escapes uses Soldo to empower employee spending while getting real-time visibility and control over spending.

Industry

Tourism

HQ

London

Employees

675

Key benefits

Opportunity to create a card for each employee

Increase financial control

Automatic transfer of funds

It’s travel’s worst-kept secret. Secret Escapes is a members-only club famous for its offers on luxury holidays and hotels. But here’s something you might not know: their finance team’s secret weapon is a smart spend and expense management platform. Here’s how Soldo helps their business.​

To find the best deals, Secret Escapes’ employees make numerous purchases online every day. Whether it’s hotel rooms, flights or other dream holiday components, totals can rack up quickly. So, their old way of managing expenses – using corporate cards attached to a single bank account – proved problematic.

 

Business within bounds​

In addition to the complexity of tracking the spending of individual employees, the tedious process of activating new cards was a bottleneck the finance team didn’t need. But the most challenging issue was credit – when limits were exceeded on a single card, the bank would block all cards. It meant that (often at the busiest points) their staff couldn’t do business.

To compound their problems, the bank prevented Secret Escapes from clearing the balance on individual cards or distributing credit across all cards. The flexibility just wasn’t there. With the company growing quickly, these pain points became more pressing with each passing day, prompting the finance team to explore alternatives. That’s when they found Soldo.

“Soldo has been a great addition to our functionality in the finance team”

Martyn Sexton
Finance Manager

For Martyn Sexton, Finance Manager at Secret Escapes, the main benefit is very straightforward: ‘Soldo has given us more freedom.’ ​

With Soldo, his team can give each employee a virtual Soldo Mastercard. Issued instantly, employees can start making spending decisions right away, letting them get the job done. Adding and allocating funds is simple and free. And exceeded credit limits and blocked cards are a distant memory.

Effortless control​

Importantly, with Soldo, freedom doesn’t mean a loss of control. Quite the opposite. Martyn explains:​

‘Soldo has been a great addition to our functionality in the finance team; we’re able to empower trusted users to make spending decisions whilst maintaining an appropriate level of oversight and control through the admin portal.’ ​

Today, with employees being able to easily attach receipts of invoices to transaction data, onerous administrative tasks are a thing of the past. And the finance team finally has real-time visibility on spending, helping them gain actionable insights and improve capital allocation.