Coronation Fund Managers: Expenses in financial services

Industry: Financial Services
Financial software: Access Accounts

Overview
London-based Coronation Fund Managers is an independent, specialist fund manager founded in 1996 providing sophisticated investment solutions to institutional clients.

A paper-based process under strain
Most Coronation employees are frequent travellers and as the business has expanded, the amount of travel has increased proportionally.

Clinton Martin, Chief Financial Officer, explained some of the complexity that the organisation faced:

“Once a month, the finance department would update a spreadsheet with the latest foreign exchange rates, and we’d email this to each employee. Each staff member would input their expenses, print out the claim and send this for approval to their line manager. This often caused delay, as line managers were themselves frequent travellers.”

“Accounts staff would then input the data line item by line item to the company’s core financial software, Access Accounts. This was a frustrating and time consuming task.”

The process was creaking under the strain until WebExpenses was introduced.

Immediate improvements
Martin explained that the benefits of a web-based solution were immediate, in the first instance in the front office:

“The feedback that we received from front office staff was extremely positive. Where previously they input expenses only once they returned to the office, they now enter their expenses wherever they are in the world.”

“The exchange rate functionality is particularly useful, and they have been keen adopters on the feature that lets you send expenses by SMS.”

The benefits in the back office are also substantial:

“The process was immediately transformed. The time savings in the accounts department are significant and we are able to post the consolidated data to Access quickly and easily.”

“Where we previously input only summary data, we now include all data, including the description, which includes client details. Our auditors are particularly impressed by that feature.”

“We also make use of the feature that allows us to flag expense items that exceed predefined category limits. This allows us to pay extra attention to certain items.”

Source : Webexpenses

WebExpenses is the leading provider of expenses solutions for small, mid-sized and multi-entity organisations.

Implementations can range from companies with a single user to those with several thousand users across the world, in industries as diverse as consultancy, consumer goods, financial services, healthcare/pharmaceuticals, IT, recruitment and telecommunications.

A unique approach to expenses software
A key factor differentiating our products from those of competitors is that they can be configured and implemented immediately, thus delivering a high and rapid return on investment.

We believe that the cost reduction benefits of lower travel and entertainment spend and reduced processing costs are considerable. However, in contrast to other expense claim automation providers, we believe that achieving these cost savings should not require a lengthy and costly system implementation.

WebExpenses minimises implementation costs as follows:

• Our applications allow for immediate implementation with a flexible configuration handled remotely by an experienced team. There is no requirement for our implementation staff to visit a customer's location.

• Our user interface allows employees to create and submit expenses with a minimum of formal training. In fact, the WebExpenses user manual has been condensed to a single postcard-sized document.

As a result, our customers achieve a rapid implementation, immediate cost savings and a very high return on investment.