Expenses Solutions for Medium-sized Organisations

Client Overview

Founded in 1992, Metro Safety is now one of the UK's leading fire, health and safety inspection specialists. The company completes over 150,000 site visits per year providing essential fire, health and safety routines to over 5000 properties nationwide.

Metro Safety's focus is on innovation, integrity and high service levels and it has an in-depth knowledge of current legislation including the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. With a wealth of fire safety expertise, Metro Safety employs more than 20 technical specialists who have (on average) more than 25 years' relevant experience in this field.

Expenses software for a team of external workers

Metro Safety's Finance Director, Ian Clark, procured the WebExpenses system in 2007. Previously, the company expenses were taking up far too much time and were becoming a 'horrible task with lots of problems' as he goes on to explain.

"I needed to find a way to push some of the time and work back onto the end-user, which is why an online system seemed like an attractive proposition. The paper system we were using was flawed and people were always asking for extra time to process their expenses, which then transferred additional pressure on to the finance department"

Metro Safety's employees are often required to travel within the UK, incurring the usual expenses. In particular, Senior Fire Safety Advisors spend a lot of time managing and training people, making a great deal of site visits. These external workers find the WebExpenses system especially helpful because it makes life easier for them to be able to update their expenses daily on their laptop and submit them remotely - which they are requried to do twice a month.

There are also over 40 company credit card users within Metro Safety, which used to create a paper work nightmare but now electronic transactions can be uploaded directly into the expenses system, saving time and errors.

How WebExpenses works for Metro Safety

Time-saving has been one of the major benefits of the WebExpenses system. Metro Safety has just under 100 employees and half of them have expenses to process. By introducing the WebExpenses system, Metro Safety has saved at least a whole man day a week in the accounts department.

"It's given me the ability to look at overviews and trends," continues Finance Director Ian Clark, "and while I don't think there was over-claiming or 'fiddling' taking place, I can now see if one individual is travelling 20% more than any other employee, for example, and find out why. And when you do look into examples like this, it's amazing how quickly they all come back into line again.

Once a year I go though every single claim for a period and examine them closely and the WebExpenses system helps me to analyse this data."

Metro Safety has a very clear expenses policy, which is understood and embraced fully by its staff. It is now much easier to manage and police that policy with a system like WebExpenses in place because it is difficult to over-claim or submit a claim late. Now everyone knows the parameters and has to work within them, in accordance with a web-based system.