How We Are Social mastered expense management

At We are Social we have different types of expenses to manage: our own of course but also those we handle for our clients. As an agency, we make a lot of purchases on behalf of companies whose online presence we manage, for example stock photos from image libraries, music for videos or goodies for competitions. Our clients rely on us because their purchase processes can be cumbersome, so we need to be more agile than them.

Before Spendesk, we had two credit cards that got passed around between employees to pay for their operating expenses. Obviously that wasn’t practical, especially when everyone needed the card at the same time. It also meant that employees had to interrupt me several times a day to get the card to pay for small expenses and I ended up playing the role of go-between. But the worst was when the card would disappear and we couldn’t work out who had it last. Twice I had to cancel the card thinking it was lost only to find it stuffed in a drawer. Collecting invoices was also a challenge to say the least. Every month, I was missing €30,000 worth of invoices; we were facing real “ghost debits”. Not to mention the risk of fraud…

Expense reconciliation and accounting was a real headache too. We used to scan all of our suppliers’ invoices for online archiving. At the same time, we’d centralise payments using an excel file where we’d try to match each payment to its corresponding proof of payment. Apart from the quest of proofs of payment, which was a total nightmare, it was also very difficult to match each expense to the right project. We had more and more sources of information, none of which were up-to-date or gave me the full picture.

I really needed a tool both for reporting and operations. I need to be able to monitor expenses incurred but before, I didn’t even have real-time visibility of flows in the company. In my job I need to have all the data necessary to optimise our processes and budgets.

What’s more, managing expenses and payments is time consuming and frustrating: I was wasting so much time processing expense slips, which is neither my job nor my teams’ job. We needed to free up time to be able to focus on our real duties.

Spendesk provides an innovative solution, and it was vital for us to choose a software in line with our DNA and our business vision. The added value for us today comes from being able to manage purchase requests and generate virtual credit cards, which allows our employees to make online purchases independently and securely.

In terms of reporting, with Spendesk we can assign a project code and client code to each expense, which allows us to track costs and work out our gross profit with much greater accuracy. I realised that we had a tendency to overestimate our gross profit by processing certain direct costs as overhead expenses. That’s been rectified now, so we’ve been able to optimise our expense tracking and budget monitoring.

Year end is much more straightforward. Spendesk allows me to delegate responsibility for supplying the invoice to the person who made the purchase, which is a real time saver. Since the tool is both user-friendly and fun, employees play along and are more inclined to turn in their invoices.

With Spendesk, I can monitor expenses while still giving the team a good deal of independence. My mind is far more at ease today. We’re really saving time and so we’re saving money! I’d say we’ve gained more than two days a month, which translates to more than €6,000 a year!