Clara Launches Free Solution for Companies to Manage Reimbursements

Clara’s new solution has no per-user cost and is a practical option for companies managing employee requests.

São Paulo, December 2024 - Clara, Latin America’s leading solution for corporate expense management, announces a new feature on its Platform: a module for managing reimbursements of expenses made by employees through any payment method. The feature simplifies and speeds up reimbursement management, allowing companies to abandon Excel spreadsheets, emails, manual processes and even software dedicated exclusively to this function. With Clara’s tool, available free of charge to Platform users, everything from request to payment is centralized in one place.

Clara’s new feature, which arrives in time for companies to review their processes for 2025, aims not only to save time but also to let finance teams work with greater agility and regain control over their processes. Today, many employees must wait up to 30 days to receive amounts they advanced from their own pockets, while companies can spend 273 hours processing reimbursements, equivalent to a productivity loss of BRL 300,000 for every 1,000 requests*. That time could be devoted to more important tasks if the process were more agile and efficient.

Typically, to get their money back, employees must photograph the receipt, send the image with a description by email or form, and wait weeks until the amount is deposited in their account, often without even receiving confirmation that their request was approved. At the same time, finance teams must gather the various reimbursement requests, verify that they comply with the company’s expense policies, consolidate them in a spreadsheet with employees’ bank details and periodically send them to the accounts payable team. All of this creates room for operational errors and consumes valuable time.

Clara’s new solution was developed to change that reality: easy to use and agile, it is fully customizable to each company’s needs and centralized in a single Platform. In practice, employees can request reimbursements with just a photo of the receipt and a few clicks, which can be approved or rejected automatically according to the rules set by finance teams, including multiple approval layers based on amounts, spending categories and even vendors.

“We were born to eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency in companies’ expense and reimbursement management, and we did so first with Latin America’s most advanced corporate credit card Platform. But we understand that even those who use a corporate card have expenses paid by PIX or with a personal card. Now, for those cases, expense reporting can happen as simply as all payments made with Clara cards. Our new reimbursement module guarantees a great experience for employees and greater control and less bureaucracy for the company, at no cost,” explains Francisco Simon, country manager of Clara in Brazil.

What sets the new feature apart is that it adds to a broader payments ecosystem that already includes credit cards and other payment methods such as PIX, boleto and TED. The reimbursement module is fully integrated, allowing companies to pay employees directly using the balance in Clara’s digital account. The entire process is also enhanced by cutting-edge technologies such as OCR and AI receipt recognition, combined with the Clara app and Platform to deliver a fluid and efficient user experience.

“At Clara we work every day to build a new era in expense and payment management, and that means offering alternatives so that old reimbursement methods are definitively replaced. We offer this new feature free of charge and with no employee limit because, as a matter of principle, we do not want any employee to struggle to receive a reimbursement. We believe the process should be as simple as a click,” Simon concludes.

The tool arrives shortly after the launch of other important resources for the startup’s corporate payments ecosystem, such as Insights, an AI-based tool that offers recommendations to finance teams.