Clara Launches Solution for Companies to Process Reimbursements and Save Hundreds of Hours

Clara’s new solution has no per-user cost, making it a practical option for companies that manage employee reimbursements.

Mexico City, 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 solely to this function. With Clara’s tool, everything from request to payment can be handled in one place, integrated with the rest of its financial solutions.

Clara’s new feature not only aims to save time but also lets 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 nearly 300 hours processing reimbursements, equivalent to a productivity loss of about MXN 1 million 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 collect 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 corporate reimbursements and keep company finances clearer. But we understand that, today, 100% of companies still carry out some type of reimbursement process. Even employees who have Clara corporate credit cards and enjoy all their benefits sometimes have to make a cash payment with their own resources during a business trip or while preparing an event. For those cases, reimbursement should not be a hassle. If reimbursement is going to be a solution, it had better actually solve something,” summarizes Juan Zuluaga, director of product.

What sets this new feature apart is that it is part of a broader payments ecosystem that already includes credit cards and other payment methods such as SPEI. The reimbursement module is fully integrated, allowing companies to pay employees directly through SPEI using the credit line offered by Clara. The entire process is also enhanced by state-of-the-art technologies such as OCR and AI receipt recognition.

“At Clara we work every day to build a new era in payments management, and that means offering alternatives so that old reimbursement methods are definitively replaced. We offer this new feature 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,” Zuluaga 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, and technology that enables invoice recovery from the SAT in seconds.