Takeaways

• A platform that provides seamless integration to the business accounting system making reconciliation easier and closure of books faster.
• A platform that helps business owners avoid spending on their founder cards and prevents employees from making out-of-pocket expenses
• Spenmo is perfect for marketing agencies that handle multiple clients as it offers a great deal of convenience via virtual cards and expense tracking features.

The Challenges

Kaliber is a performance marketing services provider headquartered in Singapore with offices in Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Australia. Its diverse team of experts managed over US$500m in ad spend and has driven over $3bn in revenue for the largest brands.

Kaliber has also worked with over 50 brands worldwide and as it expands its portfolio of digital services, it is faced with several challenges in implementing its business processes, particularly in managing its digital marketing and client expenses.

Pain Point: Laborious way of managing marketing expenses and client ad spending

Before using Spenmo Smart Cards, the company charges all its expenses through the founder’s Amex card. For a while, this resolved all its spending being consolidated in one statement of account. However, as its roster of clients’ ad spending grows, accounting expenses and tracking became more difficult. For one, the accounting team needed to wait until the end of the billing period to have a detailed look at the expenses. This step made it a little harder for the members of the team to reconcile the expenses, record and track them.

"We used to manage expenses manually. Initially, we track ad spends by sifting through the many Amex transactions just to find the one we're looking to log, pull a receipt from an inbox or take a photo of a physical receipt, pass that onto a team member and then manually input and log that into Xero", Robert said.

The manual process of expense tracking entailed a lot of time and labour. Kaliber employees were faced with a much tougher challenge managing the ad spending.

"We also use the Amex card to pay for ad spends we conduct for our clients. It took us forever to sync or process because we had to cross-reference against the Customer ID issued by Google."

Kaliber was looking for a platform that could automate their expense tracking without the gruelling process of reconciling client IDs on Google against the information logged on Amex's credit card billing statement.

"We wanted a dedicated card for each of our clients and just thinking about it seemed impossible."

In a business model that involves millions of dollars in marketing spend, designating a credit card for each client is not realistic. This goal only worked out once Kaliber opted to use Spenmo Smart Card which can be assigned and customised for each customer.

These are the main use cases for Kaliber to onboard with Spenmo:

• The need to eradicate tons of labour when tracking and recording clients’ ad spends
• The use of the Founder’s Amex card for digital marketing expenses
• The difficulty in reconciling and cross-referencing silent expenses
• The tendency to overspend and risks of undergoing hacking and fraud

The Solutions

The use of virtual Smart Cards assigned to each Kaliber client for easier tracking of ad spending

Kaliber onboarded with Spenmo allowing them to assign one virtual card for each client. All ad spending and marketing fees were charged to the client’s card. There was no need for Kaliber employees to cross-reference customer spending with customer IDs issued by Google.

"Since using Spenmo, we've managed to create Virtual Cards as a replacement for our Amex Card, get the card users to take a picture of the receipt with the Spenmo map and simply  'Sync to Xero' to have our records updated."

An expense map to detect possibilities of fraud and stop the likelihood to overspend

A dedicated card for each client was easier to track and manage. Spenmo’s map makes it possible for Kaliber to check any discrepancies and anticipate any possibilities of fraud.

"Spenmo made it a lot easier for us to reference as well as have a sense of security in the scenario in which we may overspend or if an ad account were to get hacked and spend an excessive amount of money."

Kaliber was also able to set the exact budget allotment for each client’s marketing spending. With a specific limit, there will be no instances of going over the allowed budget.

Objective Met

Kaliber now runs every expense through Spenmo, according to Robert. For them, it was easier to keep their expenses in one place and automatically aligned them with the right expense category. Kaliber was able to save time, money, resources and a lot of stress as the platform is seamless, easy to follow, and onboard people within their team.

With a seamless expense tracking and management system, digital marketing service providers like Kaliber no longer see any impediments to growing their scope and portfolio. With Spenmo Smart Card, there were no risks of overspending, erroneous expenses tracking and laborious reconciliation of spending.