Spend operating system for UK SMBs

Run every company expense
through one system.

Recavo unifies your cards, receipts, policies and accounting. AI reads every receipt, drafts your spend policy, and answers plain-English questions — then exports clean, VAT-coded books to Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent.

UK only at launch KYB required Funds held by regulated partners

Monthly spend

£42,850.12

AWS

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−£1,240.00

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Corporate

•••• •••• •••• 8412

Sarah Thompson

VISA

Works with the tools your accountant already uses

Xero
QuickBooks
FreeAgent
Sage

New · Expense Automation

Spend rules that enforce themselves.

Write your expense policy once. Recavo routes submissions to the right approver, checks every request against your rules, and keeps everyone in the loop — without the spreadsheet relay.

Departments and approvers that match your org

Group your team by department, name a department admin, and approvals route to the right person automatically. No more “any admin will do” free-for-alls.

In-app inbox, plus the email fan-out you'd expect

Every submission, approval, and decision lands in one place. Notify the right person the moment something needs attention — and stop refreshing email.

AI-assisted policy authoring

Talk to Recavo like a colleague. Describe what you want covered, refine the language back-and-forth, and ship a policy your team actually reads.

Submit-without-a-card

Contractors, new hires, and anyone without a card can still submit receipts. Recavo checks the policy in real time and rejects anything out-of-bounds before it hits an approver's queue.

How automation works

Three steps. Then it runs itself.

01

Set the policy

Write it the old way, or have Recavo draft it conversationally. Either way, it lives in one place and gets enforced automatically.

02

Route the work

Departments and department admins decide who approves what. Owners and admins still see everything; everyone else only sees what's theirs.

03

Stay in the loop

Inbox, email, audit trail. Every decision is logged. Every recipient gets notified. Nothing falls through.

Built for teams with structure

Mirror your org chart — without rebuilding it.

Departments give your business the org structure expenses actually need. Pick who approves what, where each team sits, and what level of spending they're trusted with — all without leaving Recavo.

Department admins can approve their own team's expenses and purchase requests. Owners and admins keep the bird's-eye view. Everyone else sees exactly what they need to — nothing more.

  • Group team members by department in one click.
  • Promote any team-member to department admin for the team they're already on.
  • Toggle “can submit expenses” per person — perfect for contractors and new hires.
  • Archived departments stay in the audit trail forever, but disappear from active lists.
Departments3 active
Name
Members
Admins
  • Engineering
    12
    1 dept admin
  • Operations
    4
    1 dept admin
  • Marketing
    3
    No admin
Notifications
3 unread
  • Sarah submitted £42.00 at Pret a Manger
    Engineering · needs your approval
    2m
  • Your purchase request was approved
    Monitor · £289.00
    1h
  • Policy updated by Tom
    Effective today
    Yesterday

Approvals that don't slow people down

One inbox for every expense decision.

When Sarah submits an expense, the right department admin sees it within seconds — both in the Recavo inbox and in their email. When that admin approves or rejects it, Sarah finds out the same way. No one has to remember to chase. No one has to remember to update.

  • Per-user inbox, sorted newest-first, with a live unread count.
  • One-click “Mark all read” when you're already on top of things.
  • Email fan-out for the moments you're not in the app.
  • Full audit log of every decision, for the moments your accountant asks.

Smart policy, smarter requests

The policy writes itself. The requests check themselves.

Write the policy by having a conversation

Recavo's policy assistant asks the questions a great finance lead would: per-category caps, receipt requirements, who approves what, and how exceptions get handled. Refine until you're happy. Ship it in minutes, not weeks.

Pre-approve big-ticket spend without the back-and-forth

Need a new monitor? Submit a request, paste the product link, and Recavo's AI pre-checks it against your policy before the department admin even sees it. Out-of-policy requests get rejected (with a reason) before they waste anyone's time.

AI Spend Assistant

Ask your spend a question. Get a straight answer.

Skip the pivot tables. Ask Recavo in plain English — “Where did we overspend last month?” or “Top 5 spenders in June” — and get an answer grounded on your real transactions.

The assistant only ever works from your actual numbers. It’s instructed never to invent figures, so you can trust what it tells you.

  • Plain-English questions about budgets, merchants and categories.
  • Answers grounded on real, live transaction data.
  • Never invents figures — if it doesn't know, it says so.
Spend Assistant
Grounded on your live data
Where did we overspend last month?

Two departments ran over budget in May:

Marketing+£3,120 (118%)
Engineering+£840 (104%)
Where did we overspend last month?Top 5 spenders in JuneHow much VAT can we reclaim this quarter?

What it does

Three things, done properly.

Issue cards in seconds

Virtual and physical Visa commercial cards for any employee, included with each active team member. Per-card limits, MCC blocks, freeze in one tap.

AI reads every receipt

Cardholders snap receipts the moment they pay. Recavo's AI vision reads the merchant, total, VAT and date, then auto-matches the receipt to the right transaction.

Export clean books

VAT-coded, GL-mapped data syncs to Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent. Month-end in hours, not days.

How it works

From bank transfer to clean books.

01

Open an account

We KYB your company and verify directors. Most accounts approved within one business day.

02

Fund your balance

Top up via Faster Payments from your existing UK business bank. Balances are held with our regulated payments and issuing partners, never lent.

03

Issue Visa cards

Virtual and physical cards for every active team member. Set limits, categories and merchant rules per card.

04

Reconcile and export

Receipts auto-match. Code spend with VAT and GL accounts. Export or push to your accounting tool.

UK bankFaster PaymentsPartner balanceHeld with regulated partnerCard authorisationVisa network · 3DS / SCAMerchantSettlement in GBPFLOW OF FUNDSRecavo never holds customer funds on its own balance sheet.

Customer funds move from your UK business bank account to our regulated payments and issuing partners, who hold the balance your cards spend against. Recavo authorises card transactions against that balance via the Visa network, with 3DS and Strong Customer Authentication on web payments. Recavo never holds customer money on its own balance sheet.

Controls

Real-time spend controls.

Set per-card daily and monthly limits. Block categories like gambling or cash withdrawal at the network level. Freeze any card instantly from web or mobile.

  • Per-card and per-team budgets
  • MCC category blocks
  • Instant freeze and unfreeze
Card · Tom Edwards
Daily limit
£500.00
Monthly limit
£5,000.00
Blocked
Cash, Gambling, Crypto
Status
Active

Mobile

Receipts read by AI at the till.

Cardholders get a push notification the moment a card is used. They snap the receipt, add a note, and Recavo's AI vision extracts the merchant, total, VAT and date — with a confidence score — and matches it to the transaction.

  • Push at point of sale
  • AI extracts merchant, total, VAT & date
  • Capture via app, email & WhatsApp
Receipt · Pret A Manger
Amount
£23.45
VAT (20%)
£3.91
AI confidence
98%
Matched to
Card ••1234

Accounting

Clean books, pushed to your accounting tool.

Tax codes, tracking categories and chart of accounts pulled from Xero, QuickBooks or FreeAgent. Coded transactions push through to your books. Available on Growth and above.

  • Xero · QuickBooks · FreeAgent
  • VAT-coded line items
  • CSV export with GL mapping
Xero export
Transactions
248
VAT-coded
100%
Tracking categories
Department
Last sync
2 min ago

Built for the UK

Made for British SMBs, not retrofitted from elsewhere.

Recavo Ltd is incorporated in England & Wales. We work with UK regulated partners for payments and card issuing.

FCA-aligned

Built to the standards expected of UK financial services.

GBP-first

Native sterling. No FX markup on UK spend.

UK rails

Faster Payments top-ups, usually credited within hours.

HMRC-ready

VAT-coded exports your accountant can file from.

Security & compliance

Compliance-first, by design.

We make money from a simple per-seat subscription — not from FX spreads or interest on customer balances. Funds are held with our regulated payments and issuing partners.

Read our security overview

Tokenised card data

PCI-DSS scope minimised. Card numbers never touch our infrastructure.

3DS & SCA

Strong Customer Authentication on every web transaction by default.

Encryption everywhere

TLS in transit. AES-256 at rest. Per-tenant key isolation.

Audit trail

Every action logged with role-based access and immutable history.

SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 on roadmap · UK GDPR compliant

Month-end shouldn’t take three days of chasing receipts. Recavo captures spend as it happens, so the books reconcile themselves.
Why we built Recavo

FAQ

Sensible questions, plain answers.

Who can open a Recavo account?
Any UK-incorporated limited company with verified directors. We KYB the business and verify all material beneficial owners before activation.
How are customer funds held?
Customer balances are held with our regulated UK payments and issuing partners, separately from Recavo's own funds. Recavo does not hold customer money on its own balance sheet, and we do not lend, invest, or earn interest on customer balances.
What card network do you use?
Visa commercial. Cards are issued by our regulated issuing partner under license from Visa.
What happens if a charge is wrong?
Raise a dispute directly in Recavo. We capture the details and submit it to the card network on your behalf, then keep you updated on the outcome — no phone calls or paper forms.
Can my team spend internationally?
Yes. International spend settles in GBP using the card network's reference FX rate. Recavo does not add its own FX markup; any cross-currency fee charged by the network or our issuing partner is passed through at cost.
Can I cancel?
Yes. Subscriptions are monthly. Close your account at any time and we will return your remaining balance to your nominated UK bank account.
Can I export my data?
Always. Full transaction, receipt and reconciliation data is available as CSV, or pushed to Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent on Growth and above.