“The roll-out has been a huge success for us—so our sister company will be joining next".
CFO
Global Food & Beverage Company
Endeavour Foundation helps people with intellectual disabilities live their best lives. The foundation’s staff provide a range of support services designed to assist independent living and employment.
Sophie Parrish is a former Accounts Payable Manager and current Change Specialist with Endeavour Foundation, and says switching to ExpenseMe yielded immediate benefits for everyone involved.
“Before switching to ExpenseMe, we were very manual and really paper-based,” Parrish explained.
“We have around 2,500 employees on the books—many of whom use a corporate credit card.
“The way we used to reconcile expenses was they would receive a statement with a coding slip, and they would have to go through, line by line, and input each line of coding into an Excel spreadsheet.”
Parrish says that while all corporate expenses went through the Accounts Payable department, personal expenses were paid for in cash—leading to some employees carrying dangerously large amounts of money on them.
“We had a lot of cash on site, and a lot of cash out with our workers in the community,” explained Parrish. “So we also wanted to mitigate that risk as quickly as possible.”
With employees working throughout New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland—and the foundation needing to not only reconcile corporate and personal expenses, but also provide receipts and transaction reports to a diverse range of stakeholders—Parrish admits implementing a new expense management system involved a range of complex considerations.
“We were looking not only for corporate expenses and solutions around personal spending, but we also wanted a way to provide copies of receipts and access to those transactions for families, trustees and financial administrators,” Parrish explained.
“So we had a pretty demanding set of requirements and it took a lot of time and a lot of testing to get it right.”
Parrish says Inlogik’s support was crucial in allowing the foundation to achieve its goals.
“I cannot speak more highly of the entire Inlogik project team who guided our implementation,” Parrish said.
“They supported us every step of the way. Nothing was a problem, every question was answered and they even checked in on how things were going once ExpenseMe was up and running.”
Once the new expense management system was rolled out across the organisation, Parrish says the foundation was delighted to see it yield immediate results.
“Our corporate card-holders were very excited by the new system,” Parrish said. “Because it meant they could reconcile their expenses on the go without time-consuming paperwork.”
Lauding the benefits of going paperless, Parrish admits the switch to digital expense management swiftly prompted a major cultural shift within the foundation.
“Until we switched to ExpenseMe, our staff really had no access to any apps they could use at all,” Parrish said.
“So for them to be able to use their phones to transact their digital expenses really marked a major cultural and behavioural shift for them.”
Cultural shifts and change management may be one of the unheralded consequences of switching to a digital EMS like ExpenseMe, but Parrish says it’s a welcome change.
“Our finance team found everything a lot easier for them when it came to accounts payable and even our everyday banking,” Parrish said.
“And out on site, in our independent living houses, we saw an instant reduction in the use of cash. Because workers could use their corporate cards more, they realised they could now capture receipts electronically.”
“We switched our payments from around 90% made in cash and 10% in old-school debit cards transactions… to 83% of payments made by corporate card and just 17% made in cash.”
While Parrish admits that switching from cash payments to digital expensing involved a degree of concerted change management, the biggest payoff was simply the amount of time ExpenseMe helps the foundation save every day.
“It’s been a huge time-saver for our finance teams,” she said.
“Just being able to export information from the system on a weekly basis and import it into ours, there was a lot of work behind the scenes that went into ensuring all of that worked seamlessly.”
With thousands of support workers on the ground across multiple states, Parrish says Inlogik’s unwavering commitment to providing ongoing support was another key factor in the smooth transition.
“We have very complex financial arrangements and structures, and Inlogik just made everything work in a way that was really seamless for us,” she said.
“And the immediate result was that corporate cardholders and the finance team just saved so much time reconciling expenses.”
Pointing out that support workers can also now do their expensing on the go without having to worry about keeping a running mental tally or filling out time-consuming expense reports, Parrish says the time saved on expensing can go back where it’s truly needed—assisting people with disabilities to live their best lives.
“Corporate expenses are no longer one of those annoying jobs our cardholders have to do every month, it’s now just a quick job they can get out of the way and move on with their day.
“For our support workers and those local frontline leaders, it saves a lot of time reconciling cash, chasing up when money goes missing, and not having to worry about spending hours chasing a missing couple of dollars.
We’ve found we’ve given a lot of time back to our frontline staff to do the job that they’re there to do, which is to support our clients. So it’s made a huge difference.
Along with the time saved on what was once a tedious process of expense management, one of the other major benefits of the switch to ExpenseMe has been more accurate reporting.
In an environment where every dollar counts, ExpenseMe allows the foundation’s staff and support workers to keep accurate records—down to the last cent—of how funds are being used.
“We felt it was important to show families that we were responsible with their personal spending, so we could account for every dollar spent,” Parrish explained.
“Being able to give them the copies of receipts and have that description field, which makes it clear what money is being spent and why, has been really important for us,” she added.
Not only does ExpenseMe make it easier for support workers to account for every dollar spent, it also cuts down on the amount of administration Endeavour Foundation’s accounting team needs to undertake.
“It keeps the accountants happy because we find that there’s less room for error,” Parrish said.
“Everything is all linked together and it’s much harder to make errors.
“We know everything’s accounted for, nothing goes missing, it’s easy to reconcile, and it saves our finance team so much time.”
To find out how Inlogik can help you save time and simplify your expense management, simply book a demo.
