This Swiss dental care brand switched to Webexpenses Cards and cut expense processing time in half.
Curaden is a Swiss-owned oral care company, headquartered in Lucerne and best known for its Curaprox range of dental products. The UK operation is on a growth trajectory, with a team that includes business development managers regularly out on the road.
Rachael Hollis, Curaden’s financial controller, inherited Webexpenses when she joined the company. The system was already in place, but it wasn’t yet being used to its full potential: the team were managing company spend through Barclaycard, with expenses handled separately.
What changed things was switching to Webexpenses Cards. With spend and expense management living in the same platform, the manual reconciliation and back-and-forth that came with running two separate systems disappeared.
The other thing that kept Rachael firmly on board was the control the platform gives her. “It doesn’t let you do half a job,” she says. “It won’t let you submit a claim until you have completed all the mandatory fields. For me, that’s a big win. In terms of time saving, this has at least halved the old processing time.”
Around 15 cards are now in circulation across the team. The sales team use the expense cards for day-to-day spend – parking, lunches, client training sessions. The operations manager uses hers for office supplies.
Rachael has one herself for ad hoc purchases, covering the kind of small business costs that would otherwise require a purchase order and an invoice. “It just saves us having to go down the purchase ledger route,” she says.
One Barclaycard remains active for the general manager, as a ‘just in case’, but everyone else has moved over.
In terms of time saving, this has at least halved the old processing time.
The clearest sign that the switch has worked? Silence. “No news is good news,” says Rachael. “I haven’t had any complaints, and I always take that as a sign that everything is working just as it should.”
That might sound like a low bar. But for anyone who has managed a finance system rollout, it isn’t. Getting 15 people to adopt a new way of working, with minimal complaints and no one demanding to go back to the old way, is exactly what a smooth implementation looks like.
The team member who travels most frequently – regularly making the trip to HQ in Switzerland – has had the fewest issues of anyone. “If there was going to be somebody with potential issues, it would be him,” Rachael notes. “But he’s always been fine. There have been no problems with using his card abroad or with currency conversions of transactions.”
Automated approval routing means claims move through without Rachael having to chase anyone, and the system’s built-in policy checks ensure everything is coded correctly before it reaches her. Less admin, fewer errors, and a process that largely runs itself.
Curaden are also set to benefit from the up to 0.75% unlimited cashback that Webexpenses offers on every eligible transaction made with the card. “It’s a great perk, isn’t it? Everything helps,” says Rachael. The company has already registered to get the benefit once it’s live.
Curaden’s expense process is in a good place. The cards are embedded, the team is comfortable, and the system is doing what good software should do, fading into the background and just working.
