How Viridity helped Making Waves Foundation save three weeks a month using Weel

The challenge: shared cards, missing receipts, and no accountability

Viridity is a boutique outsourced finance and digital advisory firm led by Director Rhys Roberts, supporting clients across NFPs, professional services, ecommerce, and manufacturing. As a strong advocate for technology-enabled finance, Rhys is always looking for tools that reduce manual effort and improve governance, both for his team and for clients.

One of Viridity’s most impactful Weel implementations was with Making Waves Foundation, a not-for-profit delivering sailing programs for young people with disabilities and disadvantaged youth.

Before Weel, Making Waves was operating with a highly manual and fragmented spend process.

At the centre of it all was a single shared debit card, kept in an office drawer.

Anyone could take the card to Bunnings, Coles, Officeworks, or use it for fuel and trip expenses, with no reliable way to track who spent what.

“There was no traceability,” Rhys explains. “And that created a huge reconciliation burden every single month.”

Why the old approach wasn’t working

The shared-card setup created multiple compounding problems:

• No accountability
  Transactions weren’t tied to individuals, making it difficult to identify who made each purchase.
• Constant receipt chasing
  Every month, Viridity sent long lists of missing receipts. Making Waves staff circulated them internally, often without success.
• Delayed and inaccurate coding
  When receipts couldn’t be found, expenses were reconciled to a cash account, reducing visibility and weakening governance.
• Operational complexity on sailing trips
  Boats travelling up the coast involved multiple skipper handovers, with the same card passed between people, further complicating attribution.

By month-end, both Viridity and Making Waves were losing weeks of time, and the organisation lacked a reliable audit trail for donor-funded spending.

Looking for a scalable, accountable solution

Viridity needed a solution that could:

• Eliminate shared-card risk
• Assign clear ownership to every transaction
• Capture receipts in real time
• Simplify reconciliation and reporting
• Support not-for-profit governance requirements

That’s when Rhys introduced Weel.

The solution: moving spend into Weel

Weel replaced the shared-card workflow with a structured, accountable spend setup.

What changed

• Individual virtual cards were issued to each skipper and team member who needed to make purchases
• Nine distinct budgets created in Weel to track spend across programs, people, and teams
• Real-time receipt capture via the mobile app
• Clear attribution, every transaction tied to a specific user
• Instant visibility into spend during long sailing trips
• Seamless Xero integration, dramatically simplifying reconciliation for Viridity

Instead of trying to reconstruct spend after the fact, finance now had clean, structured data from the moment a purchase was made.

A complete turnaround for receipts and reconciliation

The biggest impact was felt at month-end.

“Weel instantly fixed the problems and saved us, and our client, hours of time,” says Rhys.

Today:

• 97% of expenses are completed
• The average expense is submitted within 2.9 days
• There is no end-of-month receipt chase

Receipts are captured and coded in real time, removing what was previously a three-week reconciliation effort.

Clear accountability and audit confidence

With Weel in place, Making Waves now has:

• A clear record of who spent money, when, and why
• A reliable audit trail for donor-funded programs
• Stronger governance for board and auditor reporting

This level of clarity is critical for a not-for-profit operating under strict funding and compliance requirements.

Better control during complex sailing operations

Even with frequent skipper changes and trips spanning multiple locations, spend remains easy to follow.

Each purchase is:

• Attributed to a specific person
• Allocated to the correct budget
• Supported by a receipt at the point of spend

The operational complexity that once caused chaos is now fully under control.

The result: time saved for everyone involved

The benefits weren’t limited to Making Waves.

Viridity reclaimed hours of bookkeeping time every month, freeing the team to focus on higher-value work like reporting, advisory, and client support.

Junior accountants now spend less time chasing receipts and more time delivering meaningful outcomes.

“Introducing Weel transformed the spend management process, resulting in ongoing benefits for Making Waves and our team,” Rhys says.

The outcome: scalable finance operations with confidence

By replacing shared cards and manual reconciliation with Weel, Making Waves Foundation gained the control, visibility, and efficiency needed to manage donor-funded spend responsibly.

For Viridity, Weel has become more than a finance tool; it’s a core part of delivering scalable, compliant finance operations for clients and enabling better financial decision-making at every level.

‍