How Umati Capital gained 38 hours a month by switching to Trippeo for their business expense management

Umati Capital was founded to help farmers, suppliers, and processors in the East African agri-value chain improve their businesses through data driven financing and technology. In a region where many businesses still run on paper, obtaining financing for small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) can sometimes take months when working with traditional banks. Using a technology-driven approach, Umati Capital is disrupting traditional financial services and showing how innovation can help grow the businesses of stakeholders in the agricultural and other value-chains in the region.

With a lean team of 15 people, each of Umati Capital’s members have administrative tasks that accompany their roles. Keeping track of and staying on top of business travel expenses is one of them, and one that was occupying the valuable and limited time available. By introducing Trippeo as their expense management system Umati Capital was able to save 2 hours of each employee’s time per month, in addition to 8 hours of administrative time being spent by the company’s Co-Founder / CFO on reviewing and approving expenses. In total they’ve quickly recouped a total of 38 hours per month back towards building the business.

We spoke with Patrick Huang, Manager at Umati Capital, to discover how he found a simple way to save time.

The simplest expense management solution

Before using an expense solution, Umati Capital’s expenses were handled primarily through email. When a member of the team would incur an expense they would take a picture of the receipt with their mobile phone and would email them over to the company’s CFO. The team would do their best to group them together and include the contextual information, but because expenses were at the very end of the busy team’s priority lists, at the end of the day the CFO would find himself faced with an inbox of emails containing expenses in a number of different formats.

Patrick Huang joined the Umati Capital team full-time in 2014 after consulting with the business for 9 months. With a background in strategy and process consulting, he quickly saw which business processes were bogging down the company, including expense management. He immediately set out to find a better way to manage the company’s travel and expenses. A Google search found him some of the bigger software solutions in the market, but Patrick had one very specific requirement that was leading this search: simplicity. His team was incredibly busy and did not have time to learn new solutions. He needed a way to get them organized — and fast.

Trippeo provided Patrick with just that. A simple and easy-to-use solution, Trippeo reminded Patrick of Umati Capital’s own proprietary technology solution, which was designed and built to help business owners manage their businesses better.

Getting started on a free Trippeo trial, Patrick decided to submit his upcoming expense reports to the CFO using the new solution. He quickly realized how easy Trippeo made organizing and submitting his expenses, especially while on the go. On the administrative side, instead of being faced with a barrage of emails, the CFO could now just log in to one place when he was ready to review the submitted reports. Here he could approve or reject them, and he also found that he had all of the necessary information organized and available to him in one, centralized place. Patrick decided to discuss the solution with Umati Capital’s co-founders during an upcoming meeting. A quick discussion, a brief demo of the product, and it was that simple — they just got it.

Improved time-savings of 38 hours per month

Since implementing Trippeo the Umati Capital team has seen:

• 8 hours each month saved by the company’s CFO when it comes to administering expense reports.
• Streamlined communication through Trippeo’s expense report submission workflows.
• a 15% reduction in the number of emails sent between each team member and Umati Capital’s CFO regarding expense report status updates.
• 2 hours per employee per month gained back by incorporating technology into their administrative tasks.
• A total of 38 hours per month saved since implementing Trippeo into the company’s processes.

“The thing that we like best about Trippeo is that we don’t even need to think about expenses anymore, which is the way it should be.” — Patrick Huang, Manager at Umati Capital

Are you looking for a better way to manage your business expenses? Get started on a free Trippeo trial today!

This article originally appeared on our official blog.