How Big Red Group absorbed an acquisition without adding headcount to finance.
Big Red Group is the largest experience network in Australia and New Zealand, home to brands including RedBalloon, Adrenaline and Experience Oz. Around 100 people work across the group, connecting thousands of tourism operators and suppliers with customers all over the region.
Tiarna Cao-Kelly is the finance manager at Big Red Group. She’s been with the business for close to six years and has worked across every part of the finance function, from AP payment runs to the accounting function she now leads.
Before Webexpenses, Big Red Group ran two separate systems for expense managmenet and invoice processing.
The company’s expense reimbursements went through SAP Concur, which the team had used for five or six years. “We consistently got a lot of feedback from our people that it was a system built for accountants, not users,” Tiarna says. Reports were hard to pull, and information was limited.
On the invoice side, things were entirely manual. Staff used tools like DocuSign to route documents, coding invoices by hand and chasing signatures one at a time. With seven or eight businesses under the group, that meant a heavy weekly volume of invoices and no way to track any of it automatically.
The pressure had built up for years. But, ultimately, the trigger for change was an acquisition, which nearly doubled invoice and expense volumes overnight. “This was going to cost us an additional one and a half resources to manage it,” Tiarna explains.
Finance needed a system that could absorb that growth without the extra headcount.
"The time our team spends on Webexpenses isn’t growing with the size of the business."
Big Red Group reviewed around five providers before choosing Webexpenses. A key factor was having one platform for both expense management and invoice processing, rather than two unconnected systems.
Invoice processing, powered by our AP partner Zudello, replaced the manual sign-off process entirely. Invoices are uploaded directly, coded automatically, and routed for approval, with no one chasing a signature.
Cost was another deciding factor: the pricing for overages was far more straightforward than the alternatives on the table.
Avoiding that one-and-a-half headcount hire was an immediate saving. The benefit has held ever since. As Big Red Group has kept growing, the time its finance team spends on Webexpenses hasn’t grown with it. “The time our team spends on Webexpenses isn’t growing with the size of the business,” Tiarna says.
The quality of the reporting was an unexpected bonus. Having previously used SAP Concur, Tiarna found the analytics far more useful, particularly for tracking travel and entertainment trends across Big Red Group’s different divisions and flagging any unusual jump in costs like conferences.
Visibility has sharpened compliance too. Tiarna’s team are quicker to flag when a hotel or flight sits outside policy, rather than finding out after the booking is made. And the ability to track attendees on claims has made fringe benefits tax reporting in Australia far more precise, giving the finance team the detail it needs for FBT returns.
“It takes the administration out of something that is admin heavy,” Tiarna says. “It’s made a big difference to my team.”
Big Red Group’s situation – several businesses under one roof, high invoice volumes, and a period of fast, acquisition-led growth – is a familiar one for ANZ groups scaling through consolidation.
Our platform is built to absorb that kind of growth without adding headcount:
For finance teams managing multiple brands, or absorbing new ones through acquisition, Big Red Group’s experience shows the right platform can take on volume growth without a matching rise in admin.
