Reimburse
ments.
Pleo had no way to track expenses that happened outside of Pleo. I led strategy, research, and design on Pocket Reimbursements, a suite of features that gave companies complete visibility of out-of-pocket spend, mileage, per diem, and cash withdrawals, bundled into one cohesive product experience.
Pleo had no way to track expenses that happened off-card: cash, mileage, personal cards, per diem. A direct sales blocker: prospects asked about it in every demo, and customers were churning to competitors who offered a more complete solution.
The suite gave finance teams complete expense visibility for the first time. Sales teams reported fewer deals lost on coverage, and mileage directly unblocked conversations in the UK market where it had been a consistent objection.
Team
- Lead Product Designer (Me)
- Product Owner
- Tech Lead
- Frontend Mobile
- Frontend Web
My contribution
- Led product strategy and feature direction
- Ran research programme across finance managers and employees
- Designed the full Pocket / Reimbursements suite
- Presented strategy to Pleo leadership to secure build approval
- Advocated for post-launch rename based on user feedback
The expenses
Pleo couldn't see.
Pleo was excellent at tracking card spend. But a significant portion of business expenses don't happen on a card. They happen in cash, by car, on personal cards, or as daily allowances in the field. Without visibility of these, companies were still running parallel expense processes alongside Pleo.
This wasn't just a product gap; it was a sales blocker. Prospects asked about non-card expenses in every demo. Existing customers were churning to competitors who offered a more complete solution. The strategic case was clear: Pleo needed to own the full employee expense lifecycle.
I led the product strategy, user research, and design for the entire suite, presenting the direction to Pleo's leadership team to secure approval to build.
- Out-of-pocket expenses
- Mileage
- Per diem allowance
- Cash withdrawals
- Employee mobile app
- Admin web dashboard
- Finance export
- Research findings
- Product strategy
- End-to-end design
- Design system contribution
Strategy first,
then design.
The project opened with a research sprint, interviewing finance managers, bookkeepers, and employees across Pleo's customer base to understand how non-card expenses were currently handled, what was going wrong, and what good looked like. That research directly shaped the feature set, the naming, and the information architecture of the suite.
Each expense type had its own complexity. Out-of-pocket was the core case: receipt capture, approval, direct reimbursement to a personal bank account. Mileage was harder: logging a journey requires distance, government-specified rates, vehicle type, engine capacity, and country-specific rules. Per diem added another dimension: fixed daily allowances for employees in the field, which had to integrate with local compliance requirements across Pleo's European markets. The design challenge was making each of these feel as simple as a card transaction.
Pocket / Reimbursements
Pocket mirrors the familiar card-purchase flow: snap a photo of the receipt, fill in the details, and it appears alongside other claimed expenses. Reimbursement isn't instant; it goes through the same manager or finance review as a card transaction, but turnaround is fast.
Mileage
Recent and favourite destinations speed up the empty state, a live map validates the route as it's searched, and the confirmed journey is laid out clearly before submission. The first version didn't support editing a mapped route, a known friction point we chose to ship past and revisit later, though users could always override the calculated distance, add stops, or log a return journey.
Per diem
Per diem turned out to be more complex than expected: start time, location, international travel, and region-specific compliance rules (the right answer in the UK wasn't always right in Germany or Denmark) all had to be validated correctly behind the scenes. Meal deductions were designed to stay effortless: selecting breakfast once and applying it to the rest of the trip with a single tap.
My Cards
My Cards sits slightly outside the core reimbursements scope, but ties the suite together: showing a PIN, freezing a card, viewing limits and billing details, and switching between virtual and plastic all live here. Because card limits are drawn from a shared company pot, a user might see a €5,000 limit with less actually available, so the balance view shows the limit, days remaining, and what's left together, and a purchase-limit increase can be requested from a manager without leaving the app.
Complete
expense coverage.
Pleo could now track all types of employee expenses. Out-of-pocket, mileage, per diem, and cash withdrawals all lived in one place, giving finance teams a complete picture for the first time. Sales teams reported fewer deals lost to competitors on the basis of expense coverage, and mileage in particular directly unblocked conversations in the UK market where it had been a consistent objection.
One lesson that stood out: after launch, research showed the 'Pocket' brand was creating confusion in the sales process. Working with the product team, we renamed the feature Reimbursements, a decision that reduced the cognitive load for prospects and made it easier to explain in demos. Sometimes the right design decision happens after launch.
The suite covered card purchases, out-of-pocket spend (Pocket), mileage, per diem, and bills. Subscriptions and other expense types followed later, outside the scope of this case study.