Founded in 2016, Eezee is a regional B2B marketplace for industrial and business supplies that aims to make procurement more efficient. The marketplace provides buyers with access to a wide range of brands and products for easy comparison across goods and suppliers. As of 2022, Eezee has set up operations to Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia with plans to further expand across Southeast Asia.
As a B2B marketplace with over 1,500 connected suppliers, facilitating these individual supplier payments on time was a major challenge for Eezee. Not only was it hard to keep track, the finance team had to manually input each transaction in a master spreadsheet. While this was manageable during the company’s early days, it wasn’t long before it became a time-consuming process that took up hours a week to resolve.
The manual process was also prone to human error. In some cases, certain invoices may be overlooked or paid incorrectly. When it came time to closing the books for the month, such bumps in the road were a significant hindrance to the team’s productivity.
Before they scaled, delegating company-wide spend for specific purchases was relatively straightforward due to the lean founding team. However the same couldn’t be said as Eezee’s team size multiplied across offices in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Employees across different departments found it difficult to make purchases as they did not have access to their own company card. Eezee also soon felt the financial brunt that came with making a higher volume of international payments as costly FX fees would rack up over time. This had a considerable impact on their bottom line.
With a logistic-heavy business operation like Eezee’s, sourcing, onboarding and managing suppliers was a daily undertaking for the team. To ensure that they maintained a healthy inventory on their site, the team frequently made supplier payments on a regular basis一including FX payments to suppliers based overseas. On top of that, they used a separate platform to manage employee expenses that kept the Eezee team’s operations running everyday. This ranges from SaaS subscriptions to transport costs.
Using different apps for supplier payments and employee expenses resulted in internal finance issues as there was no centralized solution that helps to keep track of their expenses in one place.
“We chose Aspire to help us streamline our payment processes that saved us a lot of time. What we liked most is that Aspire is an integrated business finance solution that solved our disconnected finance pain points. This drastically freed up our workload to focus on our scaling efforts, one country at a time.”
- Logan Tan, CEO and co-founder of Eezee
Juggling many tail-end suppliers with low-value invoice amounts and managing employee expenses within a growing regional team called for an automated all-in-one finance solution that would help streamline their payment processes from end to end.
Here’s how they effectively optimized and centralized their scattered financial processes with Aspire.
To solve their accounts payable related issues, Eezee turned to Aspire Bill Pay.
With Aspire Bill Pay, Eezee was able to process a high volume of transactions by simply forwarding their bills and invoices via email. Additionally, by having their Aspire account seamlessly integrated with their accounting software, Eezee was also able to share bill payment data and perform bank reconciliations automatically.
This eliminated 100% of the manual data entry work, saving them valuable time to focus on growing their business.
Aspire Bill Pay enabled Eezee to optimise their cash flow by scheduling invoice payments that maximised their payment terms. By doing so, Eezee benefited from better cash flow which is critical in an industry like theirs.
Processing a high volume of low-value transactions was also a concern when incumbent banks charged a fee per transaction. With Aspire, Eezee enjoyed free local FAST transfers and low cost international transfers which supported their overall bottom line.
Eezee achieved this by issuing a total of 20+ virtual Aspire cards according to their different spend categories. Besides business-related expenses, they would use these cards to make outbound transfers to their network of suppliers and vendors, sometimes with FX involved. They were able to gain additional savings from these outbound transfers, freeing up cash flow to further their business goals.
On average, the Eezee team saved up to $3,820 on FX savings alone.
With plans for regional expansion, Eezee continued to grow with an increasing number of suppliers and customers. This made it even more crucial for them to leverage on scalable solutions to solve their financial issues internally, specifically in the area of invoice payments and expense management.
With Aspire, they've found the all-in-one solution that solved their financial pain points that came with juggling disconnected finance apps. Every dollar would be accounted for, whether an employee needed to make payment to an Indonesia-based vendor or make a SaaS subscription payment. The real-time visibility gained on streamlining finances to one platform is a significant boost in savings, at an estimated cost of $104,620 per annum.
What they also found useful was Aspire’s user-centric UI/UX that was much easier to navigate and understand compared to the finance apps they had in the past. This was essential, especially when they continue to onboard new employees to the Aspire OS.
"Truth is that Aspire was something that we have been looking at all along. Our network of suppliers and vendors would complicate our payment processes. International transfer fees started to add up as we grew. With Aspire, we were able to manage everything and maximise greater savings in one place.”
- Julian Siew, COO and co-founder of Eezee
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