Greencross Pet Wellness Company (Greencross) is Australia's largest integrated veterinary and pet services group, with more than 180 veterinary sites and 250 retail stores across the country. The group also employs around 400 people in its support office. Managing employee spend across hundreds of sites, multiple business units, and thousands of staff is not a straightforward finance problem – it is many problems compounded by geography, scale, and organisational complexity.
The challenge
Before Weel, Greencross was managing employee spend the hard way. On the reimbursements side, employees submitted claims through manual Excel spreadsheets. Each claim moved from the employee to a manager for approval, then to accounts payable by email. Missing information could trigger rounds of back-and-forth, and accounts payable had to fully onboard every employee as an ERP vendor before processing payment.
"The iterative process was exacerbated by having to keep track by email where the claim wasn't complete – somebody had to go back where there was missing/incorrect information.– Group Financial Controller
When receipts weren't captured in time – often weeks after the transaction – employees had no choice but to complete a manual statutory declaration, filed without claiming the GST. The risk of manual error was significant throughout, with coding entered by hand into spreadsheets and ERPs, and no automated mechanism to identify duplicate claims.
On the credit card side, Greencross relied on bank-issued physical cards. Cards sometimes went missing in transit. Vet sites across the country could have been left without access to funds while waiting on replacement cards. Finance raised accruals and chased the team for coding, but had no way to compel action. The process had been on the Controller’s list to fix for a few years.
The solution
Greencross evaluated three products before selecting Weel. Two factors pushed it ahead. The first was implementation speed. For an organisation spread across hundreds of sites nationally, a lengthy IT-dependent rollout was not viable. Weel's implementation timeline was short and sharp, and the Finance team could lead the rollout without requiring IT involvement from day one.
"Other software was very heavily driven toward their API. There was very little functionality natively available. With Weel, I could pretty much do it quite discreetly within Finance and hit the road running with minimal support from the business."
The second factor was a personal referral: Greencross' GM Finance had used Weel at a previous organisation and put it on the shortlist. Sometimes the best proof of concept is a colleague who has already lived it.
The rollout across a business of this complexity wasn't without friction but the Controller’s takeaway puts that in perspective. We provided Weel with feedback on the issues and bugs encountered and received feedback on what was and wasn’t possible in terms of the current roadmap.
"When I compare Weel to some of the larger vendors we use on the IT side, that's probably the stark difference: you're so invested in getting your product right and working with us to get it right. With the big SaaS vendors, it's sometimes a case of take it or leave it. That's the difference I've taken away: we're working with you to get your product better, and you're just as invested in it." – Group Financial Controller
Today, Weel is deployed across two arms of the business - Veterinary sites and the support office. Each one of the 180 veterinary sites has a Weel card operating in lieu of petty cash, with site staff using Weel for reimbursement claims. Support office staff submit all reimbursements through Weel, and senior leaders hold virtual cards. Greencross now has approximately 350 to 400 active Weel cards across the organisation, with around 400 additional users on the platform.
The results
The biggest operational win has been the auto-blocking feature. Weel blocks card usage when expenses are not coded within the required timeframe. That single mechanism has transformed expense coding from a finance team chase into a business-wide discipline.
"The timeliness of the coding is the absolute game-changer for us after enabling the auto-blocking feature." – Group Financial Controller, Greencross
Since going live on Weel, the finance team has not seen many statutory declarations. In the old system, these were a regular occurrence – triggered by employees submitting claims weeks after the fact, long after receipts had been lost. This also means no lost GST on claims where receipts could not be produced.
"The hard work has been done, and the tool has been deployed into our business, and the process is now streamlined." – Group Financial Controller, Greencross
Join Greencross 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.
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