How eFishery Conquered Indonesia’s Aquaculture And Digitised Farming, Boosted By Aspire’s Finance OS

The Company: Indonesia’s leading aquaculture intelligence company

Since its founding in 2013, the team at eFishery has been committed to pioneering the $20 billion aquaculture industry in Indonesia. Their mission to better serve local fish and shrimp farmers with an integrated platform and financing solutions proved to be a hit. 

Thousands of eFishery’s smart feeders have been used by more than 40,000 farmers from 24 provinces in Indonesia. During the pandemic, the company experienced unprecedented growth that saw their customer base multiply by 10x.

The Challenges: What pain points were eFishery looking to solve?

#1 Mounting out-of-pocket expenses

While building their integrated platform in hyper-growth mode proved to be an exciting stage for eFishery, it also came at a high cost. To meet the demands of their 10x customer base, the company ramped up recruitment and increased their headcount by 2x. With more people on the ground across over 20 provinces in Indonesia, eFishery grew to be an operations-heavy business. 

Expenses made by employees were not streamlined or automated. Hence, they had to make out-of-pocket expenses that would be claimed much later on. Their old way of managing expenses took up considerable man-hours. Add to that the skyrocketing demand for eFishery’s solutions一this meant that the team had to dedicate more time towards sorting out the over 1,000-strong team’s ever-increasing claims.

#2 Lack of control of budgets

As eFishery grew larger, the issue of managing budgets emerged. This was caused by the way they approached employee spending, which was to buy first then claim later. As a result, the finance team found that it was getting increasingly difficult to ensure spending was kept within the budgets assigned to them. The lack of transparency in how much each department was spending also exacerbated the issue.

#3 Time consuming to approve digital ad spend 

The lack of automation in their approval workflows also impacted eFishery’s marketing team. As they looked towards strengthening their presence in Indonesia, marketing efforts such as paid Google and Facebook ads rely heavily on digital ad spend. However, they faced delays in getting approval for ad spend, leading to further setbacks in their brand awareness campaigns.

The Solution: Managing spend with Aspire Cards

With Indonesia strongly in its grasp, eFishery also looks to more ambitious business goals. One of which is to onboard one million farmers to its integrated platform. However, their finance processes did not support the rapid pace in which they were growing. 

To supercharge their business finances from managing employee expenses to allowing for multi-user access to get instant department head approvals, eFishery turned to Aspire.

Here’s how they did it.

#1 Aspire cards for automated spend tracking in real-time

With the help of Aspire’s unlimited virtual cards feature, team members on the ground are equipped with purchasing power in an instant. Gone were the days of waiting weeks for claims to be reimbursed. Expenses ranging from transportation and food are easily paid via the Aspire app. eFishery also saw a boost in employee morale since onboarding Aspire Cards.

The addition of cards on the ground was not only a way to control spending, but also show a level of trust and responsibility in their employees and partners. This went a long way towards strengthening company-employee relationships.

#2 In-built budget controls ensured zero overspending

Seeing spend as it happens has been a game changer for eFishery’s finance team. Each transaction is updated and accounted for in real-time via Aspire’s all-in-one dashboard. These insights gained allowed the team to better tailor budgets for specific needs. The added transparency also assured eFishery’s management that each dollar spent could be easily looked up on the app through the handy search tool. 

With nothing in the way of knowing how much team members were spending as well as exercising control whenever it was needed, eFishery no longer experienced issues with budgeting and chances of overspending.

#3 Instant ad spend approvals 

Aspire’s impact can also be felt in the marketing team’s productivity. Before Aspire, they had to wait days for approvals on ad spend. Now, going live on campaigns, especially those that are time-sensitive, could be approved in a matter of seconds. This can be attributed to Aspire’s multi-user feature that allows for the Head of Marketing to be notified of approval requests and approve in a single click.