A per diem is a lump sum that covers your costs while travelling with work. Most typically covering meals, travel or accommodation. We offered per diems to the German market in Pleo — but our lack of support in Sweden was a common blocker for companies using Pleo.

The main challenge comes with each country having very different — and often opposite rules and regulations in place. We set to rethink the existing experience to work for both markets and scale smoothly for future markets.

We needed to create a flexible and scalable framework in the Pleo mobile app that we knew could handle different countries requirements. We initially offered per diems just to the German market as they are most commonly used there. We wanted to first expand to Sweden — but we knew other markets would follow further down the line. We didn't want to have to redesign the experience each time some new rules were added into the mix.

The first step was evaluating the current flow we had for the German market. We delved into the rules and regulations for both markets and stress tested which parts of the interface fell down or needed adapting for different regulations.

We released an updated version of the per diem feature that handled both markets requirements. And has the flexibility to accommodate future market rules and regulations.