Vantage Partners Makes Late Expense Reports a Thing of the Past

By automating employee reminders and commercial card reconciliation with PivotEQ, Vantage Partners reduced manual reconciliation from 40 hours per month to just minutes while improving on-time expense report submission by more than 90%.

Company

Vantage Partners is a global consulting firm that helps organizations negotiate, manage, and strengthen their most important business relationships. With employees regularly traveling and using corporate cards, the finance team depends on timely expense report submission and accurate commercial card reconciliation to support month-end accounting and financial reporting.

The Challenge

With 54 cardholders submitting approximately 250 expense reports each month, Carolyn Conroy, Director of Financial Operations, spent nearly an entire day every Friday tracking down outstanding expense reports.

Her weekly process required her to:

• Compare the commercial card statement against SAP Concur 
• Identify transactions that had not yet been submitted or fully approved 
• Create personalized reminder emails for individual cardholders 
• Copy and paste outstanding transactions into each email 
• Repeat the process week after week until expense reports were submitted 

The manual process consumed approximately 40 hours every month. 

Despite Carolyn's diligence, late expense reports remained a constant challenge. Employees often delayed submitting expense reports, making month-end reconciliation more difficult and leaving finance with limited visibility into outstanding corporate card activity.

The Solution

Vantage Partners implemented PivotEQ, Pivot Payables' automated commercial card reconciliation solution for SAP Concur.

Every 15 minutes, PivotEQ automatically:

• Compares commercial card transactions with SAP Concur 
• Identifies outstanding transactions 
• Tracks submitted, approved, and unmatched expenses 
• Sends personalized reminder emails based on customer-defined schedules 
• Continuously updates reconciliation results throughout the month 

Instead of manually monitoring outstanding transactions and sending reminder emails, Carolyn simply configured the reminder schedule while PivotEQ handled the process automatically in the background. 

Business Impact

The results were immediate.

Business Impact at a Glance

• 90%+ improvement in on-time expense report submission 
• 40 hours per month of manual reconciliation eliminated 
• Late expense reports become the exception, not the rule
• Commercial card reconciliation set to auto pilot 
• Employee reminder emails fully automated 
• Scalable process that grows with the organization 

Perhaps the biggest surprise wasn't the automation itself—it was the change in employee behavior.

Before implementing PivotEQ, it was common to finish the month with more than 500 unmatched credit card transactions waiting for employees to submit expense reports. Within the first month after implementation, that number dropped to just 20, followed by 7, then 2, and eventually just one outstanding transaction. 

By consistently sending automated reminders, PivotEQ transformed expense report submission from a recurring challenge into a routine process. Late expense reports became the exception rather than the rule.

"The cardholders' behavior literally changed overnight." 

Beyond Reconciliation

As outstanding transactions declined, month-end accounting became significantly more accurate.

Rather than posting a single accrual for hundreds of outstanding transactions, PivotEQ automatically prepares detailed accrual entries, predicts the appropriate natural account based on historical coding patterns, and creates correcting journal entries once expense reports are approved.

The result is faster month-end close, improved accounting accuracy, and significantly greater visibility into outstanding corporate card activity. 

Looking Ahead

Today, late expense reports are no longer a recurring obstacle for Vantage Partners.

By automating employee reminders, reconciliation, accrual preparation, and correcting journal entries, PivotEQ transformed a labor-intensive weekly process into one that requires only minutes of oversight. Whether supporting 54 cardholders or 500, the process scales without adding manual work, giving finance confidence that expense reporting and reconciliation remain timely, accurate, and under control. 

"SAP Concur and PivotEQ have become foundational to the way we manage expense reporting and commercial card reconciliation. The improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and employee compliance have been so significant that I wouldn't want to operate without them."