How a 900-Person SaaS Company Saved 10 Hours a Week on Expenses After Consolidating Five T&E Systems Into One
The Challenge
Pendo, a product analytics and digital adoption platform serving enterprise software teams, managed travel and expenses across multiple disconnected systems. Employees navigated separate booking platforms, expense tools, and corporate card programs — each with its own interface, approval workflow, and data silo. Finance had no integrated view of total trip costs or real-time spend across the company's nine global offices. Manual reconciliation consumed hours of the Global Accounting team's time each week, and reimbursement timelines stretched due to the disjointed approval chain. As the company scaled to 900 employees across NORAM and EMEA, the complexity of managing fragmented T&E systems compounded.
The Solution
Pendo consolidated onto Navan Business Travel, Navan Expense, and Navan Travel Payments — replacing Expensify and a separate booking platform with a unified experience. Automated expense approval within pre-set policy thresholds eliminated manual review for the majority of submissions, freeing the finance team from routine approvals. Real-time spend dashboards gave Global Accounting immediate visibility into outstanding expenses and total trip costs. Mobile adoption was prioritised to ensure employees could manage bookings and submit receipts without desktop access. Integration with existing HR and finance systems reduced manual data transfer between platforms.
The Outcome
The Global Accounting team saved five to ten hours each week through automated approvals and elimination of manual reconciliation work. Employee satisfaction with the travel and expense experience reached 92% CSAT, reflecting a unified experience that removed the friction of navigating multiple tools. Mobile adoption reached 83%, enabling the distributed workforce to manage expenses in real time rather than batching submissions. Expense reimbursement was standardised to five days, giving employees predictable turnaround. Conference events handling 2,000+ attendees — previously a significant coordination challenge — became manageable within the same platform.
Strategic Takeaway
Pendo's situation is representative of how T&E systems sprawl in scaling SaaS companies: each tool added to solve a specific problem creates a new silo, and the accumulated friction eventually costs more than the tools save. The ten hours per week recovered by the finance team is not a small gain — at enterprise scale, manual expense reconciliation consumes skilled accounting resource that compounds across headcount. The more durable benefit is architectural: consolidating travel, expense, and payments onto one platform means spend data, approval workflows, and audit trails are no longer split across systems. For companies managing distributed teams across multiple regions, the single source of truth for T&E data is a prerequisite for accurate financial planning.
- T&E fragmentation is a compounding cost: each disconnected system adds reconciliation overhead that scales with headcount, not with the number of tools.
- Automated approval within policy thresholds is the highest-leverage feature in expense management — it removes routine review work without changing the compliance standard.
- In distributed organisations, mobile-first T&E adoption is not a convenience feature — it is a prerequisite for timely expense submission and real-time spend visibility.
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