Southwestern Healthcare improves receipt submission compliance by 95%
Overview
Hours saved/month
10+
Receipt processing
95% increase in efficiency
Purchasing power
Increased
About Southwestern Healthcare
Southwestern Healthcare (SH) provides the administrative services for nearly 400 employees spanning four companies operating in Southwest Indiana. Among many other services, these four companies provide mental health and addiction services as well as residential, emergency shelter and crisis services to our community.
Before the pandemic, the accounting department was largely paper-driven, managing petty cash requests on a manual basis. With stay-at-home orders in place, Jenni Ashby, Controller for Southwestern, was tasked with digitizing those manual processes ASAP.
“We were largely paper-driven in our department. Once COVID-19 hit, we had to turn on a dime and try to figure out how to make all those paper processes electronic.”
“We love the platform. It’s a very easy-to-navigate solution. Any time we have interacted with PEX support, they have been very knowledgeable and have allowed us to expand our purchasing power overall. Employees can snap pictures of receipts and upload them right away, instead of us having to chase down receipts. And employees no longer have to worry about keeping track of or losing receipts, saving them time on expense management as well.”
Jenni Ashby, Controller, Southwestern Healthcare
The challenge
Employees submitted petty cash requests using either paper forms or spreadsheets. This process often caused delays in approvals and led to errors in submissions. Accounting staff manually reviewed each request and imported the petty cash data into Abila MIP, sold by Community Brands, their accounting platform. These steps consumed significant time and increased the potential for mistakes.
Prior to the pandemic, Southwestern also utilized corporate cards from a local bank. However, those cards didn’t allow transaction downloads or provide spending controls beyond the overall card limit. Cardholders and the accounting team manually logged every transaction, making the corporate cards nearly as time-consuming as petty cash.
With 400 employees and multiple companies to service, these labor-intensive processes slowed month-end reconciliations and reduced visibility into spending. The accounting team spent countless hours chasing receipts and couldn’t implement meaningful spending controls because of their reliance on petty cash.
The solution
In an effort to remove petty cash from the accounting process, the CFO of Southwestern began searching for solutions. PEX stood out as an expense management platform that could expand the purchasing power of employees and reduce manual work.
Southwestern replaced the vast majority of petty cash with PEX Visa® Prepaid Cards, enabling employees to make purchases that petty cash couldn’t cover, such as buying program supplies online or placing large food orders for group homes. Later, they adopted PEX Visa® Commercial Cards, gaining a line of credit with all the platform’s features. Jenni’s team transitioned from bank-issued corporate cards to corporate cards, eliminating the need for manual reloading of prepaid cards.
PEX automated tagging and AI-enabled receipt capture save the accounting team 10 hours each month on transaction logging and receipt tracking. Its real-time expense tracking provides full visibility into spending, allowing the team to focus on growing Southwestern’s employee programs instead of chasing receipts and logging expenses manually.
The results
Increased purchasing power
The move from petty cash to PEX’s prepaid and credit expense cards empowered more employees to make purchases necessary to do their jobs. Rather than making do without much-needed supplies, PEX enabled them to spend easily when warranted.
95% increase in receipt processing efficiency
Petty cash and bank-issued corporate cards offered zero control of employee spending. With PEX’s real-time expense tracking, accounting staff are able to set monthly spending limits for employees, depending on the ebb and flow of spending.
10 hours saved per month
PEX’s platform transferred all that time spent manually logging transactions, chasing down receipts, and tagging GL codes to automated workflows. The accounting team saved roughly 10 hours a month typing in GL codes and chasing receipts, and they were able to use that time to expand use of PEX across their company.
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