How DRP Group streamlined expenses for a team that’s always on the move.
DRP Group is a global creative communications agency delivering for an industry-wide range of clients and brands, for both external and internal audiences worldwide, and a team that is – by design – rarely at a desk.
Film shoots, live events, and internal comms campaigns take team members to sites across the UK and beyond, every week. Many of DRP’s people regularly make credit card and personal expense claims – and the amounts aren’t small.
Before Webexpenses, the cracks in the process were hard to ignore. Budget reconciliation ran three to four months behind.
The finance team was manually loading credit card data every two weeks. And the process of getting expenses coded to the right client job – or the right overheads – was, in the words of Natalie Parker, DRP’s IT project manager, “very manual.”
DRP used an in-built expenses module within their central budget management system. It worked, in theory. In practice, it was click-heavy, slow, and placed a significant admin burden on the finance team.
“We’d have to import all the data into the system for our team members and then code it to the right place,” says Natalie, who sits within the IT team and works closely with finance. “It was really time-consuming.”
The volume of company credit cards in circulation made it worse. With team members regularly working off-site – and no mechanism to capture spend in anything close to real time – the finance team was treading water.
Reconciling budgets at the end of a job was a slow, manual process, and late submissions only added to the delay.
DRP also takes sustainability seriously. It reports on CO2 emissions at board level every month, and any new system needed to support that without creating more manual work around it.
“Webexpenses was probably one of the easier change processes we’ve done because people could see it make a difference very quickly. It was easy to convince them to change.
When DRP went shopping for an expense management system, they evaluated a small number of providers. The decision came down to two things: the app their people would use while working in the field, and an in-built CO2 tracker.
“When I demo the system to our team members, I don’t show it to them on the desktop,” says Natalie. “I show it on the app, because that’s how they’ll interact with the system.”
For a team where many team members are on site without access to a laptop, the app (and its usability) matters a great deal. Our mobile app meant that DRP’s people could submit expenses while still on a shoot or at an event. Not weeks after the fact.
Our app’s suitability was a big sell. But it was our CO2 tracking feature that was, in the end, the deciding factor.
DRP’s sustainability reporting is a board-level commitment, and having travel emissions calculated automatically – and available as a bespoke report – removed a manual process from their compliance workflow entirely.
“It was just a really nice added feature,” says Natalie. “It makes [our compliance lead’s] life much easier.”
From a workflow perspective, our platform automatically routes each claim to the right budget holder – supporting multiple approvers where needed, without the manual chasing.
“The fact that you’ve got one claim header and it can go to five different approvers was great,” Natalie explains. “The right people are seeing the right costs on their jobs.”
The shift to Webexpenses has changed the tempo of DRP’s finance operation. What had been a rolling three-to-four-month lag in budget reconciliation is now a month-end process with a hard cut-off. Something that was simply not possible before.
Natalie estimates that submitting an individual expense claim fell from around seven or eight minutes under the old system to roughly one minute with Webexpenses. For DRP, that time saving accumulates quickly.
The credit card integration – with a direct feed from our credit card into the platform – means transactions are visible in Webexpenses the day after they occur. Team members can match receipts to card transactions in real time, on site, rather than reconstructing a week’s worth of spend after returning to the office.
The rollout itself was straightforward. “Webexpenses was probably one of the easier change processes we’ve done,” says Natalie, “because people could see it make a difference very quickly. It was easy to convince them to change.”
DRP’s situation – a large, mobile workforce, complex project-based coding requirements, and a genuine sustainability mandate – is not unusual in the events and creative production sector.
What it illustrates is that expense management software needs to do more than process receipts. It needs to fit around how people actually work.
Our expense management platform is built around that principle:
For finance teams that are still reconciling expenses manually, or working from a bolt-on module that was never quite built for the job, DRP’s experience is a useful reference point. The gains are not marginal.
A three-to-four-month reconciliation lag becoming a clean month-end close is a big leap forward – and it starts with the right system.
