How White Horse Missions went from petty cash to cards on mission trips
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About White Horse Missions
White Horse Mission focuses on supporting indigenous pastors and churches, primarily in Central America with mission trips across the region. Implementing PEX’s prepaid and credit solutions has transformed the way the mission teams operate and manage their spending. White Horse Mission was able to establish a streamlined process of uploading receipts, daily approvals and reconciliation in addition to wider card acceptance across different merchants in multiple countries by utilizing PEX’s cards and platform.
“PEX’s receipt [capture] basically sold me. Whoever’s in the country and using the card will sit down and take pictures of all their receipts every night. I’ll see it in the morning, do my approvals and we’ve got everything done. When [the team] comes back to the United States, there’s nothing to reconcile."
Lee Barnett, Director of Finance and Treasurer
The challenge
With mission trips across Central America being the core function of White Horse Mission, Director of Finance and Treasurer, Lee Barnett, was faced with the challenge of finding a new way to manage expenses besides cash. With large teams traveling abroad for extended periods of time, it was difficult to keep track of everything.
As Lee explains, “We had to take a lot of cash because that was the only way we could purchase groceries and supplies. It was typical for the team leader to have to take quite a bit of cash since we needed it to last for a team of 10 to 12 people. Keeping up with the receipts was always a terrible miss because when the team leader gets back to the United States, he has this stack of invoices he’s now got to reconcile. It was a nightmare trying to keep up with that.”
Furthermore, it was also a safety concern to carry too much cash, so Lee often wired money along the way as teams can be at a location for four weeks or more.
The solution
Establishing PEX has transformed the way the mission trips operate and manage their spending. The team is able to focus on the needs of the local community and spend less time on managing finances. It has simplified the reconciliation process and has made it a less stressful part of the mission operations.
As Lee says, “PEX’s receipt [capture] basically sold me. Whoever’s in the country and using the card will sit down and take pictures of all their receipts every night. When [the team] comes back to the United States, there’s nothing to reconcile. It’s already been done. That was what sold us on it – the app and the ability to upload the receipts.”
Also, by adding a PEX Credit Expense* account and the implementation of PEX Visa® Commercial Cards, Lee’s team has seen even more acceptance by vendors which proved to be a key enhancement given the many different locations they travel to. As Lee says, “We probably use [PEX Visa® Commercial Cards] even more. It seems to be better accepted since sometimes when something is a prepaid card [vendors] get a little afraid to run it but when they see a charge card, they don’t even think about it. They just run the card.”
The results
Tracking and insights
Precisely track and control spending by employees and volunteers. Payments are more transparent with the PEX solution.
Streamline reconciliation
PEX works with your General Ledger codes and integrates with most accounting software, allowing transactions to be easily allocated to different projects, events, travel, etc.
Enable funding adjustments in real-time
You have the option to either directly fund and defund cards or automate the process. Set up alerts to instantly know when a card is used or a transaction is declined.
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