Structural Concepts Supercharges Expense Management with TravelBank
Key Challenges
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Key Results
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Company Overview
Structural Concepts Corporation is a leader in temperature-controlled display units for retail chains and supermarkets. With over 50 years of experience, their mission focuses on creating stunning designs that flawlessly highlight the displayed products. The company prides itself on constant innovation, creating purpose-built solutions to increase efficiencies, save energy, and minimize operating costs.
Outdated Manual Processes Ignite the Transition to a Modern System
Structural Concepts was stuck with a time-consuming, manual process for managing expenses. “The employee would fill out their Excel spreadsheet, they would take all of their paper expenses, they would find their supervisor, get a signature, and then take all of that and scan it into a PDF document, then send it to me for filing,” said Cameron Hartman, AP Supervisor at Structural Concepts.
Moreover, they struggled to maintain accurate records due to manual entry errors, making data and receipt retrieval for audits tedious. “It was a very time-consuming process, and information and reporting was hard to gather,” Hartman added.
The company wanted a modern, paperless solution that centralized expense reporting and approvals.
An Unrivaled User Experience
Upon discovering TravelBank, the company noticed substantial differences in the user-friendly interface and simplified processes compared to other platforms. TravelBank offered Structural Concepts a fresh solution, designed with the user experience at its core. This ease of use sealed the deal for Structural Concepts.
“We compared TravelBank with a couple different, more mainstream options, and they were more complicated than TravelBank–TravelBank’s simplicity and ease of use is what ultimately ended up selling us,” Hartman said. “It’s been built from the bottom up with user experience, simplicity, and ease of use in mind–and that’s very, very evident when comparing TravelBank to some other solutions out there.”
Harnessing the Power of Automation
The introduction of TravelBank has significantly improved expense management processes within Structural Concepts. It has slashed the time spent by employees on filing expense reports by half, while saving an average of eight administrative hours per week. Furthermore, the move to an automated process has minimized errors significantly.
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The TravelBank mobile app has been a powerful tool which allows employees to swiftly capture photos of their receipts on the go, instantly generating new expenses. Utilizing optical character recognition (OCR) technology, the app then populates the expense with data found within the receipt, including date, merchant, transaction amount, invoice number, and tip amount, freeing users from tedious manual entry while improving accuracy.
“One of our more active users told me he used to spend two hours a week on his expense reimbursement process filling out the spreadsheet, stapling all their receipts together, scanning them in. And now he tells me that he is able to complete the process for a single expense walking from the cash register to his car,” Hartman said. |
A standout feature for employees is next day reimbursements. Instead of waiting until the next payroll cycle, which was their previous process, employees can receive the expense approval within minutes, with reimbursements appearing in their bank account the next business day. This has greatly increased the efficiency of their reimbursement process and satisfaction with TravelBank.
With expense data now reported directly in TravelBank, there has been a positive downstream impact to digital record-keeping. The implementation of TravelBank has made audit inquiries easier to address, conserving valuable time and resources compared to previous systems for organizing and retrieving data and receipts. “Everything expense related is now at our fingertips,” Hartman said.
Customer Service Powered by Real People
As an unexpected benefit, Structural Concepts has been genuinely impressed by their experience with TravelBank’s commitment to customer service. Whenever their team encounters an issue, they can easily reach out to our Customer Success or Support team.
“Customer service is an area that differentiates TravelBank from other solutions out there because the responses to inquiries are from real people – and very quick and helpful,” Hartman said. “We get a response from a real person within minutes. There are no problems that are lingering for hours or days or months.”
Structural Concepts has found immense success with TravelBank, allowing employees to spend less time on manual processes so they may focus on their core job responsibilities, bringing more efficiency to their workplace.
