Watch Adam Shnider, Head of Finance at Carer Solutions, explain how Budgetly cut reconciliation from a full day to just 30 minutes a week.
Overview
Carer Solutions is a service provider for people with disabilities. Using their Direct Employ service, they allow NDIS participants to directly employ their own support workers. The company also provides plan management services for NDIS participants.
Carer Solutions grew significantly since 2011, and needed a proper system to manage expenses as employee numbers grew. Staff would pay for expenses through business credit cards or use their own money and be reimbursed later. This process lacked structure and was inefficient.
Challenges
- Credit card sharing: Only a few credit cards were available for 15–20 staff. Employees shared them or used their own cards and submitted claims. The card-sharing system and claims process were lengthy and inefficient.
- No receipts for reimbursements: Employees were busy doing their actual jobs, making them time-poor in submitting documentation. Finance teams dealt with claims without invoices, receipts, or transaction details.
- Multiple document sources: Staff sent receipts through emails, hard copies, and various platforms. It was difficult for finance teams to locate receipts when needed.
- Time-consuming chasing: Finance personnel regularly went back to employees to chase receipts or ask for more information. Most staff would promise receipts and not deliver them.
How Carer Solutions streamlined expense management with Budgetly
Budgetly supplied Carer Solutions with preloaded cards, including access to expense management software usable on mobile, desktop, and laptop. Staff received physical cards and virtual cards through the Budgetly app.
Staff now use their Budgetly card to pay and record transactions in the app. They capture receipts through their phones and upload them instantly. Carer Solutions assigns budget owners within departments, and staff spend against their allocated budgets.
With Budgetly’s pre-loaded cards, finance personnel and department heads can now:
- Put controls in place and add card restrictions for staff still learning the system
- Edit budgets immediately by adding or reducing funds
- Manage budgets across departments with full visibility
- Automatically reconcile all transactions without manual effort
More importantly, administrators and finance personnel can view all transactions and receipts in one place and stop chasing staff for receipts every month.
Results
1. Reconciliation cut from a full day to 30 minutes
Budgetly’s auto-reconciliation and app features cut time spent by both staff and finance personnel dramatically.
“Since we have moved to Budgetly, the process of recording receipts and allocating spend to a particular budget has been a lot easier, quicker, and it’s saved us a lot of time. There’s minimal back and forth for the finance team.”
Adam Shnider, Head of Finance
2. Easy adoption across the team
The system was efficient and easy to use. Once staff got used to it, using Budgetly became second nature.
“The first person in our company to use Budgetly was from our marketing team, and he found it very easy! He would send me messages saying, ‘I love this new system!’ Even employees who were not technologically savvy took only one or two learning sessions to learn how to use the card.”
Adam Shnider, Head of Finance
3. Complete visibility and control
Managing company expenses became significantly smoother. Budgetly now allows Adam to verify receipts are submitted and ensure the right budgets are used for the right spend.
“Currently, the process of checking for receipts, ensuring it’s from the right budget, and exporting these statements from Budgetly to financial software takes us only an hour. It’s so easy to sort and filter all the information you need.”
Adam Shnider, Head of Finance
4. Support that makes you feel safe
From onboarding to ongoing customer support, Budgetly helped Carer Solutions implement this new process into their daily operations.
“I’d absolutely recommend Budgetly to other businesses. It’s a no-brainer. And the support from Matt and the team, from their phone call check-ins to even giving us their phone numbers, you just feel safe and secure as a business.”
Adam Shnider, Head of Finance
Full video transcript
Speaker: Adam Shnider, Head of Finance, Carer Solutions
(0:00) At Carer Solutions, we’ve made it our mission to work alongside people living with disability. We offer a one-of-a-kind Direct Employ service where people can bypass agencies and employ support workers that they know and trust. We ease the strain on partners by taking on employment obligations such as payment of wages, superannuation and work cover on their behalf.
(0:26) Before we would use Budgetly, we used to share two credit cards amongst a team of 15 to 20 people. So the credit card could have been in one person’s name but they may have no knowledge of the transaction, and then you’re trying to find who may have had the card on that any given day.
(0:43) If we had expense reimbursements, people may or may not be supplying receipts for them; may or may not be giving a description for the transaction itself either. It could take days to be able to reconcile credit card statements. It could take hours to be able to process expense reimbursements.
(0:58) I heard about Budgetly through a colleague of mine, he was aware of the pain points that we had as a business and suggested a demo with Budgetly would solve all of our problems. A half hour demonstration and I was sold! It’s quick and easy to set up. It’s quick and easy to provide access to the right people. When you’re ready to make a transaction you open up the app and you select the budget. And as soon as you’ve done that, you’re ready to use the card. It reminds you to attach receipts so you don’t have to hold on to anything to submit at the end of the month. And the portal is so clean. It’s so easy to use. You really can’t get it wrong.
(1:34) I did have exposure to some of the other expense management systems. They didn’t quite address the needs that we had as a business. Most of them still require access to a credit card and credit cards have ridiculous limits. The ability to restrict or grow the budget as needed, it just makes so much sense to use Budgetly.
(1:57) In the past, it would take us probably about a day, maybe even more, to do a credit card reconciliation, and a few hours to process expense reimbursements. To have to do that each and every month, it’s quite time-consuming. Instead using Budgetly, it takes us about half an hour a week to do our reconciliation for weekly transactions, and maybe an hour at the end of the month to upload those transactions all into our financial software.
(2:30) Over the course of a month or a year, those time savings of a week or two weeks of having an employee freed up to focus on other things, it makes a huge difference. It takes the complexity out of expense management and throws it out the window. That also provides us with greater control as a finance department because we can set the budget for any individual and for any department, and we can adjust it as time goes.
(3:00) For any other Head of Finance, or CFO, or any other finance professional looking for a solution to expense management, the ability that you have to control that level of spend, to assign it already before you have to go to your month end processes, and know that the transactions will be going to the right profit and loss accounts, they’ll be sitting in the right budgets. Everything is set up for you to succeed.
Budgetly makes that happen for you.