City Beach: Retail and consumer goods case study

Since 1985, surf, skate, and street fashion retailer, City Beach, has grown from a humble, single store (just off Queen Street Mall in Brisbane, Queensland), to a national retail chain that is now an everyday part of many Australian's lives.

During this growth, their commitment to staff and customers has never wavered. They offer the same great experience from their first tiny shop, across all their stores that thousands of people visit every day.

Managing so many stores across Australia has brought new internal challenges, including the ongoing management of both their monthly corporate card reconciliation and reimbursement of staff expenses.

Tim Tregenza, Head of Finance at City Beach, shares why they decided to make a change and bring Webexpenses on board to help.

What made you choose Webexpenses?

“The system proved to be very easy to use with enough customization to fit our company's needs.

On top of that, we now have a system in place that automatically identifies breaches in our company expense policy.’’

What Webexpenses features benefit your end-users and accounts team the most?

“Managing paper receipts is always a problem for any business. By bringing Webexpenses on board we now have no need for the physical storage of receipts in wallets, etc. This means no lost receipts and a better experience for our end users.

Furthermore, as the system can automatically match the correct receipt to the correct transaction, this saves our end users from needing to search for them. For management, they now have much better and real-time visibility overspend, with automated 'alerts' when a spend has occurred outside/above the company expense policy limits.”

What would you say to someone still using a manual, paper-based expense process?

“Webexpenses is quite intuitive and therefore, has been very easy for new users to pick up. This was important to us during the initial rollout as it meant less training time and a faster return on investment."

Learn more about Webexpenses reimbursement and payment software.