Buddle Findlay

The Challenge

Prior to Chrome River, Buddle Findlay’s finance team struggled with a highly inefficient, paper-based expense reporting process. It was particularly labor-intensive and stressful at month and fiscal-year end.

Expense claimers had to manually fill in expense forms, seek manual approver sign-off, and send paper receipts along with the signed forms via internal mail envelopes to the finance team for processing. Once received, AP had to sort, review, and manually match individual expense lines to the paper receipts, validate compliance with corporate policy, and manually key each expense line item into the financial system and allocate appropriate GL codes before finally making the payment. The process was error-prone, and oftentimes receipts or signatures were missing which meant returning forms to the submitter to start the process over again. Once complete, all physical paperwork was manually filed and stored on-site.

The Chrome River Solution

Buddle Findlay set out to modernize the expense management experience by increasing efficiency, transparency, compliance, and mobility, while reducing their carbon footprint by eliminating the need for paper documents and storage.

Agility and user experience were key decision drivers. The firm felt that Chrome River’s design was more user-friendly and intuitive than competitors; while also far more accommodating in terms of custom configurations and integration capabilities. They were also impressed with the solution’s mobile design and on-the-go features like Snap & Send and email approvals. But according to Esther Song, National Finance Manager at Buddle Findlay, the final decision came down to their sense of trust in Chrome River’s expertise and capacity to successfully support the firm’s long-term needs.

Chrome River makes our work more human by automating processes and eliminating the need for mundane data-entry. We now process expense reports 75% faster, which enables the team to prioritize more meaningful activities.

Esther Song,
National Finance Manager

The Results

Users are empowered by self-service features, such as tracking the status of an expense report, and find the solution easy to use. Approvers appreciate the solution’s mobility — particularly the ability to approve expense reports via email, anywhere, anytime. This has resulted in more timely expense report submissions, while reducing errors and duplicate approvals. 

By automating approval workflows, the finance team has realized many benefits, such as eliminating the need for manual data-entry and reducing workload pressure — especially around month and year-end deadlines. Expense report processing time has been reduced by 75%, saving the team up to 24-hours per week that can be allocated to more rewarding work. Morale has also improved, as the team is now able to leave the office on time, instead of working overtime to manually key in expense reports.

Since experiencing such significant benefits with Chrome River EXPENSE, Buddle Findlay also plans to implement Chrome River INVOICE and transition all AP processes to a central system.