For companies that send people on the road, keeping control of travel spending can feel like a full-time job. Shared corporate cards, piles of paper receipts, and late expense reports turn every trip into an accounting headache. Soldo promises a different approach: prepaid company cards tied to a real-time spend management platform that gives finance teams control while making life easier for travelers. But what does Soldo actually offer in practice, and how does it fit into a modern travel setup?
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What Soldo Is (And Who It’s Really For)
Soldo is a prepaid Mastercard-based spend management platform aimed at businesses rather than individual holidaymakers. Instead of one or two corporate credit cards circulating around the office, Soldo lets you issue multiple physical and virtual cards to employees, teams, or projects, all funded from a central Soldo account. The idea is simple: every traveler can pay for what they need directly, while finance teams still keep tight control over limits, rules, and reporting.
In practical terms, a company opens a Soldo account, transfers money into it from its regular business bank account, then distributes those funds into different wallets and cards. Each card can be linked to a person, a project, or a department, so you might have “Sales – UK,” “Marketing Events,” or “Milan Trade Show 2026” cards, all with their own budgets. Because Soldo runs on Mastercard, cards can be used at millions of locations worldwide, including hotels, restaurants, taxis, and online booking sites, in the same way as a standard business debit card.
Soldo is used across a range of sectors, from consulting firms flying teams to client sites, to construction companies sending engineers to remote projects, to yacht management outfits managing day-to-day vessel expenses. A 15-person software agency doing regular trips from London to Berlin, for instance, might use Soldo to give each frequent traveler a personal card and issue a separate project card for major client visits, so those costs are kept distinct for billing and reporting.
It is important to note that Soldo is not a bank and not a line of credit. You are spending money you have already moved into the Soldo environment. For finance teams that want guaranteed, pre-set caps on spend, that prepaid structure is part of the appeal, especially when travel is frequent and scattered across many employees.
How Soldo Cards Work When You Travel
From a traveler’s perspective, a Soldo card behaves much like a normal company payment card. Once an employee is assigned a plastic card, they can use it to pay for a hotel in Madrid, a rideshare from the airport in Dublin, or a client lunch in Milan, tapping or inserting the card wherever Mastercard is accepted. For online bookings, such as flights with a low-cost European airline or a last-minute train ticket, they can use either the physical card or a virtual card that exists only in the app or browser.
Under the surface, Soldo’s platform gives finance teams immediate visibility and control. Each card has rules and limits attached: daily, weekly, or trip-based caps; merchant category restrictions so a card can be used for hotels and fuel but not electronics; and whether cash withdrawals are allowed. If a marketing manager is traveling to a trade show in Paris with a budget of around 1,500 euros, finance can load that amount onto the card and block ATM withdrawals, ensuring that spend stays focused on legitimate trip expenses.
Travelers capture receipts at the point of purchase using the Soldo mobile app. After paying 18 euros for a lunch near Barcelona’s Sants station, for example, an employee can snap a photo of the receipt, add a quick note like “Lunch with client Acme,” and select the right project or cost centre. The transaction and receipt are then available in real time to accounting staff through the web console, rather than arriving weeks later in an expense report.
If circumstances change mid-trip, controls can be adjusted instantly. When a consultant’s meeting in Frankfurt gets extended by a day, the finance team can top up their Soldo card from the main wallet and temporarily lift a daily spending limit. Those changes apply immediately, so the traveler can rebook a hotel night or buy a flexible train ticket without using their personal card.
Wallets, Currencies, and Keeping Control Across Borders
The backbone of Soldo is its wallet structure. When a company deposits funds, they arrive in a main wallet. From there, money can be moved into user wallets (for individual employees) or company wallets (for teams, projects, or departments). Each wallet can be linked to one or more cards, and the platform shows, at a glance, how much is available and where money is allocated.
For frequent international travel, Soldo supports multiple currencies in eligible plans. A business might have wallets in euros, pounds, and U.S. dollars, for example, and issue cards in those currencies to reduce conversion costs for regular trips. A London-based firm regularly sending staff to Amsterdam could maintain an EUR wallet, funding dedicated euro cards used exclusively for euro-denominated hotels, trains, and meals. This helps reduce the uncertainty of constantly converting back from local currency to the company’s base currency.
Foreign exchange does still matter, of course. When employees spend in a currency different from the card or wallet currency, transactions are converted at card network rates, typically with a platform fee layered on top. While exact percentages can vary and should always be checked in Soldo’s current pricing documentation, many similar platforms apply FX marks in the low single digits. For trips with mixed currencies, such as a week-long itinerary covering Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, finance teams often choose to keep the main funding in a single primary currency and accept modest FX fees in exchange for simpler budgeting.
Because the wallet view shows transactions across currencies, finance teams can analyze travel costs by region or route. Over time, they might spot that average daily spend per traveler in Paris is trending 20 to 30 percent higher than in Berlin, prompting a review of hotel policies or per diem guidelines. That type of insight is hard to achieve when travel is spread across personal cards, reimbursements, and several different bank-issued corporate cards.
Real-World Travel Scenarios: How Companies Actually Use Soldo
To understand what Soldo offers, it helps to look at concrete scenarios. Consider a mid-size consulting firm in Manchester with 40 staff, 15 of whom travel regularly across the UK and mainland Europe. Previously, consultants shared two corporate credit cards, booking hotels, trains, and client lunches on them, then handing receipts to a finance assistant at the end of the month. Mistyped notes, missing receipts, and delayed statements meant the finance director rarely had a precise picture of project-level costs before invoices went out.
After adopting Soldo, the firm issues individual physical cards to its 15 frequent travelers, each tied to a personal wallet with a typical monthly limit aligned to their travel schedule. For big client engagements, such as a six-week rollout in Dublin, the firm also sets up a project wallet and a dedicated card labeled “Dublin Rollout Q4.” All hotel bookings, coworking space fees, and local transport for that assignment are charged to the project card. Receipts are captured via the mobile app, coded to the client, and visible to finance in near-real time. By the time the team returns, the client-ready expense breakdown is already reconciled.
A very different example comes from operational travel rather than consulting. A property management company running residential blocks across Italy may send technicians to multiple cities every week for repairs and inspections. With Soldo, each technician carries a card limited to fuel, tolls, parking, and hardware stores. When a boiler fails in Bologna, the local technician fills a van with fuel, pays a toll on the motorway, and buys replacement parts, all on their Soldo card. Each purchase is auto-tagged in the system with the relevant building or job ID, so that travel and parts can be tracked together. The prepaid nature of Soldo is particularly attractive in these cases, because it caps exposure if a card is lost or misused.
Soldo also appears in more niche travel environments, such as yachting. Yacht management companies have used Soldo’s multi-currency cards to handle provisioning, port fees, fuel, and crew travel across Mediterranean and Caribbean ports. Instead of wiring money repeatedly to local agents or relying on a handful of high-limit credit cards, captains use Soldo cards in euros, pounds, or dollars at marinas, grocery suppliers, or marine hardware stores, while head office monitors every transaction from the admin console.
Mobile App, Approvals, and Integrations With Travel Tools
Modern business travel rarely happens in isolation from software. Soldo’s platform is designed to sit alongside common travel and expense tools, using its app and integrations to close gaps in the process. On a day-to-day basis, the Soldo mobile app is where travelers check their available balance, request additional funds if a trip changes, and capture receipts. The app can prompt users to complete missing details, such as tagging a transaction to “Client ABC” or entering the number of guests for a restaurant bill.
For approvals, Soldo routes spend requests through predefined workflows. Suppose a marketing coordinator in Bristol needs to book a last-minute flight to Lisbon for a partner meeting that will take their spend beyond their usual monthly cap. From the app, they submit a funds request describing the trip. The system routes it to the appropriate manager or budget holder, who can approve or decline with a tap. If approved, funds flow into the coordinator’s wallet and are immediately usable on their card for booking flights, hotels, and transfers.
On the back end, Soldo integrates with widely used accounting and expense systems, such as Xero, Sage, QuickBooks, SAP Concur, Workday, and other enterprise ERPs. That means a finance manager in Dublin can export Soldo transactions, complete with VAT data, project tags, and receipt images, into the company’s accounting software at month-end. The benefit in a travel context is speed: rather than manually keying in card statements from multiple bank-issued cards, the finance team reconciles trips by pushing a clean, categorized data set into their existing tools.
Soldo can also complement dedicated travel management platforms. A company that books flights and hotels through a tool like TravelPerk, for example, might still settle those transactions with Soldo cards. Employees see their trips and tickets in the travel tool, but all the underlying payments, controls, and reporting sit in the Soldo environment. For travelers, this often feels seamless: they book in the usual way, tap their Soldo card at the airport cafe, and finance still gets the consistent data stream it needs.
Costs, Limitations, and When Soldo Makes Sense
Like most spend management platforms, Soldo charges subscription-style fees for access to its software and cards, with different plan tiers offering varying levels of features and support. Exact pricing varies by market, number of users, and chosen plan, so companies should always review Soldo’s latest pricing pages and speak with sales before committing. On top of monthly or annual fees, there may be card issuance costs, replacement fees, and transaction-level charges for certain activities such as ATM withdrawals or spending in foreign currencies.
For many businesses, those costs are weighed against savings in administrative time and improved control. When finance teams can cut the hours spent chasing receipts, manually categorizing transactions, and correcting errors in expense claims, the platform fee is often offset by staff time saved. Companies that process hundreds of travel-related expenses each month, or that run detailed project profitability analysis, tend to see the most tangible benefits because clean, timely data is essential for them.
There are, however, limitations to keep in mind. Because Soldo is based on prepaid cards, it does not extend credit. That can be an advantage for risk control, but it may be less appealing for businesses that rely heavily on the cash-flow benefits or rewards offered by traditional corporate credit cards. Some advanced features, such as multi-currency wallets or detailed analytics, may only be available on higher-tier plans, which means very small businesses making only occasional trips might find Soldo more complex or costly than they need.
Soldo is also more naturally suited to organizations with at least a small cohort of regular travelers. A three-person design studio that takes two trips a year to a trade show in Milan might manage just as well with a single bank-issued business card and a simple receipt-tracking app. By contrast, a 50-person sales organization with representatives on the road every week through Europe will gain far more from the granular limits, per-card controls, and integration that Soldo provides.
The Takeaway
In a travel context, Soldo is best understood as a control layer for company money rather than just another travel card. It combines prepaid Mastercard cards with a web console and mobile app so that companies can fund trips in advance, allocate budgets to people or projects, and see every euro, pound, or dollar spent as journeys unfold. For travelers, it replaces personal out-of-pocket payments with a dedicated company card, while reducing the paperwork they face when they get back.
Soldo’s strengths are clearest when travel is frequent, decentralized, and business-critical: consulting firms sending teams to client sites, field service technicians criss-crossing regions, or international sales teams visiting events and customers across multiple countries. In those environments, real-time visibility, automated receipt capture, and tight card controls can make the difference between travel being an opaque cost center and a manageable, measurable investment.
It is not the only option on the market, nor is it the right fit for every business. Companies comparing Soldo with alternatives should look closely at how often their staff travel, how complex their approval and reporting needs are, and whether the discipline of preloaded budgets fits their internal culture. For many medium and growing businesses in the UK and Europe, however, Soldo offers a practical way to bring order to the messy reality of travel spending, without slowing down the people who need to be on the move.
FAQ
Q1. Is Soldo suitable for individual leisure travelers, or only for businesses?
Soldo is designed for businesses rather than individual holidaymakers. It is built around company accounts, multiple cards, and integration with accounting and expense systems, which makes sense for teams and organizations managing travel budgets, but not for a solo traveler booking a once-a-year vacation.
Q2. How does Soldo help employees who are frequently on the road?
Employees receive a dedicated card for their business spending, so they do not need to use personal funds and wait for reimbursement. They can pay for hotels, transport, and meals within company rules, capture receipts with the mobile app, and request extra funds when travel plans change, while finance teams see all this activity in real time.
Q3. Can Soldo reduce foreign exchange costs for international trips?
Soldo can help manage foreign exchange exposure by allowing companies on eligible plans to hold and spend in multiple currencies, such as euros, pounds, or dollars. While FX fees still apply when spending outside a card’s currency, using the right currency wallet for regular routes can reduce unnecessary conversions.
Q4. What happens if a Soldo card is lost or stolen during a trip?
If a card is lost or stolen while an employee is traveling, an administrator can freeze or cancel it from the web console almost instantly. Because cards are prepaid with defined balances, the company’s exposure is limited. A replacement card can be issued, and funds can be moved to another card if needed.
Q5. Does Soldo integrate with existing travel booking tools?
Soldo is primarily a spend and expense platform, but it can sit alongside travel booking tools. Companies often use Soldo cards to pay for flights and hotels booked through their preferred travel management system, while Soldo handles the payment controls, transaction data, and integration with accounting or ERP software.
Q6. Are cash withdrawals allowed on Soldo cards when traveling?
Cash withdrawals can be enabled or disabled at the card level, depending on company policy. Some businesses allow ATM use for situations where card payments are not practical, while others block cash entirely to maintain clearer digital records and reduce risk. Any allowed withdrawals typically count against the card’s overall budget or daily limits.
Q7. How does Soldo handle receipt collection for travel expenses?
When employees make a purchase, they can photograph the receipt using the Soldo mobile app, add notes, and tag the expense to a project or cost centre. The image and transaction are stored together, making it easier for finance teams to verify spend, manage tax requirements, and close the books quickly at month-end.
Q8. What types of companies benefit most from using Soldo for travel?
Companies with regular travel across multiple employees see the most value. Examples include consulting firms, sales organizations, field service providers, construction and engineering companies, and operational teams that routinely visit sites, clients, or events in different cities or countries.
Q9. Is Soldo a replacement for traditional corporate credit cards?
For some businesses, Soldo replaces traditional credit cards entirely, while others use it alongside them. Soldo’s prepaid structure appeals to companies that want strict budget caps and real-time oversight, whereas credit cards may still be used where extended credit, larger single-purchase limits, or specific reward schemes are important.
Q10. How should a company decide if Soldo is the right fit for its travel needs?
A company should look at the volume and complexity of its travel, the pain points in its current process, and the value of real-time visibility. If chasing receipts, reconciling shared cards, and understanding project-level travel costs are ongoing problems, and if several employees travel regularly, then a pilot with a platform like Soldo can be a useful way to test whether the added control and automation justify the subscription and transaction fees.