Major football clubs can rack up an average of 150 travel days each year, both nationally and internationally.
Pre-season meets and in-season matches mean that players are frequently on the move for over 8 months out of the year, and with these trips come the associated expenses. In a large, sprawling organisation this can get very complex. And it’s difficult to find the time to stop to think – is there a better way to do things?
Caxton is working with several major football clubs to deliver an expense management solution that is simpler, more personalised and with better rates than the banks. Read on to find out how we did it.
Due to the legacy nature of expense management in some major football clubs, the systems used have often been added to over time, and there are many different solutions working together to form a (mostly) whole.
Some employees have been assigned business credit cards, whereas others have not been eligible and are instead using their personal cards.
This makes adequate reporting incredibly complex. Reviewing spend on business cards is fairly straightforward, but does not take into account spend on personal cards.
Reports have to be cobbled together from multiple sources, and having a real-time view of potential issues or overspend becomes almost impossible.
And in addition to this, fees are extortionate. But for these large organisations with complex needs and several levels of approval, it was hard to find a solution that met all their needs.
A one-size-fits all solution will never be acceptable to a large, prestigious organisation with a constant need for good quality expense management and reporting. So instead, Caxton created bespoke solutions to meet specific needs, and assigned each of our football clubs their own dedicated account manager.
This means that any queries or urgent needs are met quickly and efficiently, with pre-loadable corporate cards getting into the hands of the right people in as little as three days.
What the football clubs needed was a simple, integrated payment solution that allowed direct oversight of spend as it was happening, not after the fact. They also need to be able to understand spend and report it.
They can also put spend limits in place and have clear oversight over spend as it’s happening, not after the fact.
Using Caxton became somewhat of a lightbulb moment for the football clubs we are working with – why are we still working within a legacy system, when there is something so much better out there? Using Caxton for expense management, the clubs have streamlined processes to give all travel managers the same type of card, with reports collated in one platform. This has had the dual effect of decreased overspending and drastically cutting down the time spent on reporting. Based on the wins achieved when using Caxton for international expense management, they have now further streamlined the process to include using Caxton domestically. And the high level of personalised service they are receiving is delivered at scale, with less fees and rates up to 15% lower than what they could get from traditional banks.