Belvoir St Theatre has been staging Australian drama for almost 40 years from its home in Surry Hills, Sydney. It runs two stages under one roof, an upstairs main stage and a downstairs space built for community engagement, and tours nationally and internationally throughout the year. A finance team of 3.5 FTE supports 40 full-time roles across the organisation, plus a rotating cast of contractual, show-specific staff who come and go with every production.
Theatre runs on spend that moves fast and unpredictably: costumes, wardrobe, sets, paint, props, transport, and touring costs that shift show to show. When Ash joined Belvoir 3.5 years ago, that spend ran through two shared corporate credit cards, an Amex and a Commonwealth Bank card, distributed across seven or eight heads of department. With limits fixed and hard to adjust, cards changed hands constantly between managers and the staff buying for a production.
The accounting followed on paper, a month behind. Finance waited for statements to arrive, then chased cardholders for receipts and supporting detail. For a theatre company, that chase had a deadline built in: contractual staff leaves the moment a show closes, taking their receipts and their memory of the transaction with them. Every cardholder kept their own tracking worksheet on top of what finance was managing centrally, and unaccounted "ghost" transactions were sometimes written off rather than chased down.
One staff member carried the bulk of that reconciliation. Ash puts the monthly cost at one to one and a half weeks of admin time, plus what he calls "lots of frustration, delay" along the way.
"We were running one month behind in accounting because we had to wait for the paper statements to come." - Ash Rathod, CFO, Belvoir St Theatre
Weel's fit for Belvoir started with the accounting system underneath it. Ash runs Xero, and Weel's general ledger and tracking category sync moves transactions between the two platforms in real time, with no separate coding structure to reconcile.
The second piece was control over cards themselves. Weel moved Belvoir from seven or eight shared cards to 40 individual ones, one per cardholder, removing the physical hand-offs that made accountability so hard to trace. Managers adjust or block cards to match a production's calendar. When a contractor's engagement ends, Belvoir blocks their card and collects any outstanding receipts before they leave, instead of chasing them for weeks afterwards. Cards also block automatically once an expense sits unlodged past a set number of days, putting the deadline back where it belongs, with the person who made the purchase.
For a cardholder, lodging an expense now takes seconds: a photo of the receipt, a general ledger code, and a tracking category.
"It's not hard. You just click a picture of the receipt, and then the system lodges the expense with GL, tracking category, and description. That's it. Now we are no longer chasing transactions and receipts." - Ash Rathod, CFO, Belvoir St Theatre
Belvoir now runs 40 active cards across the organisation, processing $850,000 a year, or roughly $60,000 - $70,000 and 450 transactions a month on average, a figure that rises significantly in peak season.
Since switching to Weel, the team has been able to save the one to one and a half weeks a month it once spent reconciling paper statements, and put that time towards other work instead: analysing show profitability and running feasibility studies before a production goes ahead Ash says, "was not possible without Weel."
Every cardholder's individual tracking worksheet, and the shadow spreadsheet finance kept alongside it, is gone. What replaced them is Weel's personalised dashboard Ash checks each morning to see approvals waiting, top-ups to release, which transactions are stuck and with which manager, and every card's outstanding balance.
"It's like sitting in the cockpit of a plane where everything is visible." - Ash Rathod, CFO, Belvoir St Theatre
Ash has been with Weel since its earlier days as DiviPay, and describes an ongoing feedback loop with the product team where he shares his product recommendations. To his surprise, the recommendations he raised 12 to 18 months ago, some he had since forgotten, have shown up in the product since.
That history is part of why Ash is confident the shift is permanent. Belvoir's newer accountants have grown up on mobile apps and tablets, not paper ledgers.
"It's next to impossible to replace the Weel platform." - Ash Rathod, CFO, Belvoir St Theatre
Three and a half years after two shared cards and a month of catch-up accounting, Belvoir runs 40 individual cards, processes around 450 transactions and $70,000 in spend a month, and gets one to one and a half weeks back every month to put towards the shows themselves rather than the paperwork behind them.
Join Belvoir St Theatre and 4,000+ other businesses running their spend on Weel. Book a demo or take the product tour to see how Weel can fit within your finance function.
