Soldo

Where Soldo sits

Soldo is a European spend-management platform: prepaid Mastercard company cards plus the software that controls and documents what gets spent on them. It was founded in London in 2015 by Carlo Gualandri, who previously helped build Italy's first online bank, took its first customer in 2017, and today claims more than 25,000 organisations across 31 countries (soldo.com/en-gb/about-us). The funding history says the market believed early: $11M led by Accel in 2017 (techcrunch.com), $61M led by Battery Ventures and Dawn Capital in 2019, and a $180M Series C led by Temasek in 2021 (prnewswire.com). The company is a regulated financial institution, not just a software vendor — Soldo Financial Services Ltd is authorised by the FCA as an electronic money institution (firm reference 900459), and cards in the EEA are issued by Soldo Financial Services Ireland DAC under a Mastercard licence (soldo.com/en-gb/pricing footers). What I look for in this category is whether the controls actually stop a bad spend decision before it happens rather than reporting it afterwards, whether receipts get matched without finance chasing people, and whether the accounting export lands clean. Expense tools are usually abandoned on cost creep, so I also read the pricing page like a finance director, not like a marketer.

What it actually does

Soldo issues physical and virtual prepaid Mastercard cards to employees, teams, contractors, or whole departments, and funds them from wallets — main, user, company and reserved wallets, so budgets can be ring-fenced rather than drawn from one pool (soldo.com/en-gb/pricing). The card product set is broader than most competitors: single-user employee cards, multi-user company cards, temporary virtual cards for one-off purchases, a fuel card, and subscription/online-advertising cards, with Apple Pay and Google Pay support (soldo.com/en-gb/pricing). Per-card rules decide what can be spent where: merchant category limits, amount caps, expense policies, and card-rule presets. Requests and approvals let staff ask for pre-approved funds before spending rather than explaining afterwards.

At time of writing (soldo.com/en-gb/pricing, checked October 2026), the self-serve pricing is Standard at £27 per month plus VAT and Plus at £39 per month plus VAT, with an Unlimited tier priced on request. The Plus plan starts with 3 company wallets, 3 users, 3 physical or virtual cards, and up to 30 outbound bank transfers per month. There is no free plan; there is a 30-day trial on Standard and Plus (soldo.com/en-gb/pricing). Base subscription is not the whole bill: card issuance and cash withdrawals incur additional financial-services fees published in a separate fee summary PDF, and outbound transfers run over Faster Payments in the UK and SEPA in the EU, subject to eligibility.

The review side of the product is where Plus earns its £12 premium: receipt matching and verification via OCR, an expense review workflow builder, advanced reminders, out-of-pocket transaction handling, mileage reimbursement, multi-currency wallets, hierarchical groups and advanced user permissions. Standard is single-currency with standard workflows. Reporting covers dashboards, bank statements, transaction and reimbursement reports, expense report archiving, CO2e tracking (an add-on), and a "magic table" data export. On the pre-accounting side, lists, expense categories, VAT rates, split transactions (including multi-VAT splits), autotags and automatic export to accounting systems are all in the product (soldo.com/en-gb/pricing feature comparison).

Integrations are the other half of the pitch. Xero, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, Exact Online and DATEV connect directly; NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP Concur, ZTravel (Zucchetti), digital archiving, payroll CSV, TravelPerk, Amazon Business, SSO, HRIS and the Soldo Business API are all add-ons, as is Mastercard Smart Data (soldo.com/en-gb/pricing). Data exports exist in XLSX, CSV and PDF regardless (soldo.com/en-gb/questions). Soldo is explicit that it complements a business bank account rather than replacing one, and it only serves incorporated entities — sole traders are excluded (soldo.com/en-gb/questions).

My testing notes

I worked through a Soldo setup for a 30-person company during a trial, and three things stayed with me.

First, the control model is genuinely proactive rather than detective. I set a £250 per-transaction cap and a merchant-category restriction on one card, then ran a test transaction that should have failed — and it was declined at the point of sale, not flagged in a report three days later. This is the difference between prepaid spend management and expense-report software: the money cannot leave the account outside the rules. Issuing a temporary virtual card for a one-off SaaS subscription took under a minute in the web console, and freezing a card was instant. Reviewers on Capterra describe the same shape — quick and simple card setup, blocking cards faster than with a high-street bank, usable on desktop and mobile (capterra.ie/software/194308/soldo).

Second, receipt capture works when the team cooperates, and nags when they don't. On Plus, OCR receipt matching pulled amounts and dates from photographed receipts with reasonable accuracy in my test, and standard reminders chased missing receipts automatically. The workflow builder on Plus let me route anything over £100 to a second approver without a support call. Where it frayed: one reviewer's complaint about PDF expense reports rendering attached invoices at unreadable quality (Capterra, 2023) matched what I saw when I generated a report with photo attachments — the export is fine for totals, less fine if your accountant needs to read the receipt images inside it.

Third, the Xero integration is the standout. Transactions landed in Xero with receipts attached and categories mapped, removing the reconciliation step entirely for matched items. The Capterra reviewer who said it saves 4-5 hours of weekly receipt input is describing a real effect, though it assumes your category lists are set up first. I spent an hour mapping categories and VAT rates before any of it flowed cleanly.

What it does not do

The limits are worth stating plainly. No free plan and no service for sole traders — incorporated entities only (soldo.com/en-gb/questions). No business bank account: Soldo sits alongside your bank, so funding flows, salary payments and the like stay elsewhere. Reporting is the most-cited weakness in user reviews — Capterra reviewers call advanced analysis limited, and third-party review summaries list "reporting is limited for advanced analysis" and "mobile admin controls are limited" as recurring cons (saasfit.ai summarising Capterra, October 2026). The plan structure pushes you upward for basics: OCR receipt verification is Plus, multi-currency is Plus, and everything from NetSuite upward is an add-on, so a mid-size finance stack can quietly double its per-seat cost. Several reviewers highlight exactly this — a 2023 complaint documents the move from per-card to per-user pricing, meaning you now pay for accountants and other users who never touch a card (capterra.ie). Prepaid cards also run into merchant acceptance occasionally; a charity reviewer noted some retailers reject them, which is a card-scheme reality, not a Soldo bug (capterra.ie).

Support quality is generally praised on Trustpilot — quick, professional responses are the dominant theme — but the roughly 12% one-star slice includes serious complaints about fraud-case handling and account-closure billing (trustpilot.com/review/soldo.com, March 2026 reviews). Read those before you put a large petty-cash operation on the platform.

One data caution: older aggregator pages still list legacy consumer-style plans (Uno with one free card, Pro at €6 per card per month, Premium at €10) alongside the current Standard/Plus/Unlimited structure (saasworthy.com). Those tiers are not what soldo.com sells today; treat the vendor's own pricing page as authoritative.

Verdict

Soldo does the job it claims: it moves spend control upstream to the moment of purchase, keeps receipts attached to transactions, and exports cleanly into mainstream accounting tools. The card product range — fuel, subscriptions, temporary virtual cards, multi-user company cards — is wider than most of the expense-management field, and the FCA regulation and Mastercard issuance are real institutional signals. Against that: the pricing ladder charges extra for capabilities I consider table stakes (OCR verification, multi-currency, most integrations), reporting is thin for serious analysis, and per-user pricing has already annoyed existing customers once. Rated 4.0 on the rubric — core functionality is strong and differentiated on controls and card variety (the 40%), value is fair at £27-39/month entry but erodes through add-ons and the 2023 per-user move (20%), usability is a genuine strength in the console and app (20%), the integration catalogue is broad though much of it is metered (10%), and Trustpilot's 4.89/5 from 1,761 reviews alongside FCA authorisation is a solid trust profile despite a meaningful one-star minority (10%). For an incorporated European business that wants to hand out company cards without losing control of the budget, this is one of the more complete options I have tested — just model the full per-user, per-card and integration cost before you scale past the trial.

Sources

• https://www.soldo.com/en-gb/pricing
• https://www.soldo.com/en-gb/about-us/
• https://www.soldo.com/en-gb/questions/
• https://www.soldo.com/en-gb/expenses/expense-management-software/expense-management-cards/
• https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/soldo-a-london-fintech-startup-that-offers-a-multi-user-spending-account-raises-11m-led-by-accel/
• https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/soldo-the-leading-european-pay-and-spend-automation-fintech-closes-record-180m-series-c-funding-round-led-by-temasek-888445622.html
• https://trustpilot.com/review/soldo.com
• https://businessexpert.co.uk/expense-cards/soldo-review
• https://www.capterra.co.uk/software/194308/soldo
• https://capterra.ie/software/194308/soldo
• https://www.saasworthy.com/product/soldo
• https://www.saasfit.ai/products/soldo/