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One of the legacies De Beers has to thank Bob Barltrop for, its former head of admin, is getting rid of the laborious, paper-based expenses system that the
South Africa-based diamond mining company had in place, says Gillian Upton

Some five years ago De Beers switched from an in-house travel operation to an outsourced travel management company, HRG. In doing so, the issue of expenses became more urgent as the company’s old paper-based reconciliation system could no longer be used.

The bulk of De Beers’ travel is multi-destination and intercontinental, so there was a lot of paperwork to collate. Much time was spent manually reconciling cash allowances with actual spending to determine whether travellers had exceeded or come under their trip budget – if the expenses were in budget they would be signed off; if not they had to go for approval to a higher authority.

“We had wanted to improve the process for a while and about four years ago we looked around the market place but nothing took our fancy,” recalls Barltrop. So as an interim measure the company’s 200-plus executives and other travellers busied themselves stapling receipts together, trying to remember the right code to apply to each expense so that they would be allocated to the correct account code and cost centre. Accounts then manually reviewed, reconciled and processed expenses.
“It worked quite well, albeit that it was a laborious process,” says Barltrop.“ Although everything flowed into the company’s SAP finance system from Company Barclaycard it still had to be coded expense by expense, he explains.

De Beers wanted to have a better check on expenses and for the same code to be used on each set of expenses, from the time of booking through to the Barclaycard statement, in order to monitor the costs for each trip. “Two years ago we had another look at what expense products were out there and we looked at Concur, KDS and Spendvision. They all did pretty much the same thing,” believes Barltrop.

The challenge for De Beers was to find a system that could use the same ‘trip number’ for each trip, so that the company could pull out a report on each trip and see the total cost. De Beers found the right solution and has successfully implemented it. “The initial cost wasn’t very high and it’s certainly saving us money,” says Barltrop. “The payback was very short – it was a matter of months.” Read on to find out who they chose and how they achieved their goal.

STEP 1: Constantly research the market. De Beers trawled the marketplace and returned two years later when it found the right product.

STEP 2: De Beers chose not to go out to formal tender because of its size, but this would be the next logical move. “We’re not a big user as we have between 200 and 250 corporate cards in use in the company across our 37 budget centres and we were able to negotiate a good price,” said Barltrop.

STEP 3: Choose your provider. This was an easy decision for De Beers as the only expenses provider who could satisfy its request to use the same ‘trip number’ throughout the process was web-based Spendvision. This was helped by the part-ownership of the company by De Beers’ travel management company, HRG.

Spendvision could seamlessly receive travel reservation data from De Beers’ off-line telephone reservation system at HRG as well as on-the-road expenses and cash allowance data feeds from corporate card provider Barclaycard Business. It could also automatically handle various general ledger entry tasks in order to reduce effort on the back-end processing side.

Spendvision is one of the world’s leading transaction management solution providers. It is available direct as Spendvision.com or through partners as a white label proposition to 130 banks globally, and through companies in the telecommunications and travel industries. “It’s up to customers to make the choice – Spendvision or own label,” explains Spendvision CEO Robert Kirby.

“Because it’s online and on-demand, you can buy just what you need and cherry pick,” explains Kirby. Spendvision has a standard list price of £5 per employee per month but the final cost will depend on company needs.

“Small business customers can self-install, meaning that there is no charge for installation. Larger customers may have more complex requirements which we manage on their behalf.
“Our platform does more than just bookings as we have travel and banking integrated on the one platform. Customers can have confidence that they can trust the transactions held on our platform and that their business rules are being applied to meet their business needs.

“MI and reporting can be sliced and diced in many ways – by employee, by supplier, by spend outside hours, however you want – and we can provide it online in 15 different languages. Alternatively, the data can be extracted to an Excel spreadsheet or in XML format for further analysis,” says Kirby.

STEP 4: Test the new system before implementation. “Spendvision thought it was a simple request to introduce the same trip number but like most IT projects, it took longer than expected,” recalls Barltrop. Rather than taking weeks it took months so Spendvision was finally implemented in March 2009 rather than in 2008. But first De Beers did the sensible thing and tested it for two months on three different departments to sort out any IT issues – and there were none. It was then rolled out overnight to the rest of the UK company.

STEP 5: Train users on the new system.
De Beers’ finance department took responsibility for the new system and ran voluntary system training sessions in the company’s training room over lunch breaks over four weeks.

STEP 6:Implementation. “It went in very, very easily,” says Barltrop. “We were expecting some kickback from the new system but it just didn’t happen and travellers were very receptive. Any senior director who wanted to could delegate it to their PAs but very few did.

“I’m not very techno-savvy and I picked it up really quickly,” says Barltrop. “Travellers can go into Spendvision from wherever they are in the world, at whatever time of day, log into their account and pull down the various pre-coded, pre-populated boxes for expenses, such as food, hotels and taxis so they can’t get the code wrong. They have to name who they’ve entertained so we‘re also getting greater control,” says Barltrop. Travellers also submit their expense claim that is pre-populated with their current Barclaycard charges, electronically.

STEP 7: Review the system and check whether it’s achieving your goals. The finance department reckon Spendvision is saving the time of half a person but the benefits go beyond money savings. “We have greater control now,” says Barltrop. “We know who travellers are entertaining, it flags up who has exceeded their cash allowance budgets, the system handles VAT on our European expenses and we have improved MI which we’re just getting into now. Our longer-term goal is to get greater leverage with our suppliers.

“It’s also a lot easier now to budget for each trip so we can start to budget better overall,” concludes Barltrop.

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