Rally turns receipts from the field into finished bookings.
Rally is a fleet card and a spend platform in one: fuel, charging, parking and service across Europe, with the receipts collected from the field. Everything a booking needs is known at the moment the receipt arrives, and the only question is whether it survives the trip into the accounting system.
The sandbox and the REST API did the work
“Maesn transformed the way how to integrate with DATEV. What would have been a complex long process turned into a smooth, intuitive process thanks to their REST API, DATEV sandbox and certification process.”
Who Rally is, and where Maesn sits in it
- Website
- getrally.com
- About Rally
- A fleet card and spend platform backed by Y Combinator, covering fuel, EV charging, parking and service across 21 countries in Europe and the UK, with more than 1.000.000 acceptance points. Rally publishes SOC 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR compliance.
- Who it serves
- Business owners, fleet managers, finance and accounting, and the drivers themselves, who send receipts in from the field by web or WhatsApp.
- Use case
- Getting captured spend into the customer's books as a booking rather than an export. The workflow itself, independent of any one platform, is on the payment reconciliation page.
- Accounting and ERP systems
- DATEV, Xero and QuickBooks, among the systems Rally names, on one connection
A receipt loses its context when it becomes a row
Fleet spend is not created in an office. It happens at a filling station in another country, and the facts that make it bookable are only all present at that moment.
A driver buys diesel and sends the receipt in from the road. Rally captures it, matches it to the card payment it belongs to, checks the VAT against the rate of the country it was issued in and assigns the purpose and the cost centre. At that point the expense is fully described, and it is described better than anybody could describe it afterwards.
A manual export is where that ends. What survives a spreadsheet is the date, the merchant and the amount, and everything that made the record useful for accounting has to be reconstructed by somebody who was not there. Pushing the same spend into an accounting system as a real expense, with its document and its tax treatment intact, is the expense sync problem in its hardest form, because a fleet crosses borders and the correct rate changes with them.
The expense arrives with everything that was attached to it
Three things have to land together for the enrichment to be worth anything: the expense itself, the document it came from, and the tax treatment the receiving system understands.
Written as an expense rather than as a line in an import file.
The receipt itself, attached to the record it justifies. Both DATEV products are among the four.
So the rate on the booking is the one that system actually defines.
The cost allocation is the part that looks like it should be its own object and is not. Rally assigns the cost centre while the receipt is captured, and it travels with the booking rather than as a record written into the target system: the master lists differ per business, and several systems keep dimensions that exist in that one installation and nowhere else. Customisation handling is the part of Maesn that reaches fields of that kind, which is what keeps a cost centre from being the reason a booking is rejected.
Everything else is the difference between an expense in one system and an expense in another, and there is a lot of it: what the record is called, which fields it demands, how a document is attached to it, what a tax rate is allowed to be. The common data model resolves that before Rally sees it, so one enriched expense is written once and lands correctly in a German ledger and a Dutch one.
DATEV was on the critical path, and then it was not
DATEV was on the critical path to Rally's German launch. What the integration changed first was the calendar, and what it changed afterwards is who has to touch a receipt at all.
Rally publishes 18 hours saved per month on admin and accounting work, and a month-end close four times faster than before.
Those are Rally's figures for Rally's platform rather than results of the integration. What the integration decides is whether the last step of that chain is an export somebody cleans up or a booking that is already right.
The reason it matters to four different groups at once is that they all touch the same record. A driver sends a photo and hears nothing more about it. A fleet manager sees the vehicle it belonged to. Finance sees a booking with a cost centre on it instead of a queue, which is the accounts payable side of the same work. And whoever owns the numbers gets a month-end that does not start with a reconciliation. The case for that, in the terms the people who carry it use, is on the page for financial teams.
Common questions
What does the integration move?
Why does the enrichment have to happen before the export?
Are cost centres created in the accounting system?
How does VAT work across 21 countries?
How long did the DATEV integration take?
Can another expense platform use the same setup?
Reads the ledger through Maesn and keeps the bank side on its own connection, then writes the reconciled bookings back.Read the case study
Automates the full accounts payable cycle and posts every payment back into the customer's ERP.Read the case study
Turns tracked project time into draft invoices inside the accounting system the customer already runs.Read the case study