COMPANY NAME
Cove

COMPANY INFO

Co-living marketplace platform

COMPANY SIZE

30 - 50 employees

INDUSTRY

Hospitality

ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE

Xero

Takeaways

• A platform that decentralises company expense spending, but has features that gives managers visibility and keep spending in check, saving countless hours of manual tracking.
• A platform that helps to pay invoices from local and overseas vendors

The Challenges

Cove is a co-living marketplace startup, leasing fully furnished, fully equipped rooms and studios across Singapore and Jakarta. Their spaces use smart home technology and also use artificial intelligence to match flatmates based on living habits, values and interests.

Having recently raised a Series A funding round of US$4.6m in December 2020, Cove is looking to grow its team and property portfolio in Singapore and Jakarta in 2021.

Pain Point: Inefficient manual management of expenses

Before adopting Spenmo’s products, the Cove team shared a founder’s card. This card sharing brought about several inconveniences, such as having to message one person for the OTP whenever others were transacting, as well as having to manually identify who made the various transactions and matching the same on month-end basics. As a result, this led to employees wasting a lot of time going through tedious manual processes such as these.

”As our business grew, so did our day-to-day expense transactions across the team. It was difficult to trace who made what transaction at the end of the month, and we felt that there definitely had to be a more efficient way than the old-school way we were using”, Sophie mentioned.

As a growing company, the Cove team needed to eliminate this inefficiency and was interested in using Spenmo for more streamlined, centralised functions to manage petty cash and employee expenses.=

”With the missing receipts and incomplete data, reconciling the books on month-end has been such a long and tedious process. Not to mention the payouts that go along with these claims.”

They were also looking for software that could assist in local and overseas payouts for vendors, which would replace the time-consuming process of manually paying their vendors through bank transfers.

”Sometimes, invoices sent by vendors were missing some fields and this lack of standardisation meant that quite some time was wasted in feedback loops requesting vendors to amend the invoices slightly, before spending more time typing out bank transfers.”

As a property tech startup known for embracing new technological solutions within hospitality, Cove naturally decided to explore Spenmo’s digital solutions.

These are the main use cases for Cove to onboard with Spenmo:

1. Need for individual corporate expense cards for Cove employees as opposed to one single card.
2. Efficient, timely payment to vendors both local and international
3. Replacing the month-end claims with a digital way of reimbursing employees using PayNow.

The Solutions

Physical and virtual smart cards for employees for hassle-free spending

By using Spenmo’s cards, employees do not need to spend out of their own pockets first, nor wait long for monthly claims to be reimbursed. Each Cove employee now receives their own physical company card, with a pre-loaded amount for expenses in line with company policies.

Instead of keeping paper receipts and screenshots of billing summaries for making claims at the end of the month, Spenmo allows users to attach receipts and reconciliations digitally on the Spenmo platform itself, making it easy for end-of-month tracking.

For Cove’s subscription payments, employees can use their virtual cards. Additionally, while transactions were tracked manually before, which was slow and didn’t allow for greater analysis and forecasting, transaction data is now captured in real-time and visible on the dashboard.

“Adopting Spenmo has paved the way to streamlining our daily operational expenses. We no longer have to maintain ledgers or chase users for receipts, which is a great time-saver and overall a more pleasant experience.”

For business travel between Singapore and Jakarta when work travel resumes, Spenmo’s cards can be used across 210 countries, making it convenient for the team to spend while working abroad.

Efficient, instant invoice management

As Cove continues to grow, so does its list of vendors. This makes it challenging for the team to keep track of different costs and different billing cycles as they work with more and more companies.

This made it crucial that Cove automated this process in order to keep a clear view of the total spend. With Spenmo, the team at Cove can now approve and pay for all their local and overseas vendors’ invoices in a timely manner, preventing the risk of incurring late penalty fees.

Objective Met

Since using Spenmo, the Cove team has been enjoying greater convenience and efficiency in their financial operations. The time savings it has brought for the lean team has meant that more time to focus on other parts of the business.

Additionally, the real-time expense data in the Spenmo dashboard has helped the team in forecasting future spending and evaluating their budgets with greater clarity.