How Eezee automated their Accounts Payable Automation saving 700hrs/yr

The Company: B2B Marketplace for Industrial and Business Supplies

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.

The Challenges: What pain points was Eezee looking to solve?

#1 Difficult to manage high volume of invoices

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.

#2 Racked up transfer fees with headcount in multiple markets

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.

#3 Disconnected expense management

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.