Stone & Chalk Group manage employee expenses with ease through corporate credit cards

About Stone & Chalk

Stone & Chalk Group is the largest innovation community in Australia with a mission to transform Australia into a sustainable, tech-driven economy. Stone & Chalk Group brings together founders, investors, industry stakeholders, and mentors into one network to drive growth and commercial success for tech startups and scaleups.

The Challenge: Inability to customise individual corporate card limits, managing card sharing, and time-consuming expense receipt management

For Stone & Chalk Group’s CEO – Michael Bromley, and Group Operations Manager – Sarah Mitchell, having complete visibility over company spending is of paramount importance. With 75 employees to manage, and multiple team budgets to oversee, they needed the ability to customise spending limits without compromising on expense documentation. But current bank providers did not offer this depth of functionality.

Michael: “Every time we went to a big bank, they told us the same thing. Basically, they'll give us debit cards and they'll give us one facility and we won't be able to control the individual cards, the individual accounts. It makes accounting for the spending difficult. It makes setting limits for individual cards difficult.”

In the end, the Stone & Chalk team would only be armed with 1 or 2 cards, leading to card sharing amongst employees. From an accountability perspective, card sharing became difficult for the Group’s Finance team to manage, and it also led to gaps in expense documentation and organisation.  

Sarah: “For us, one of the senior team members has the credit card and it gets passed to somebody else to run and do an errand and go and pay for something and somebody else needs it and then passed and then, you have moments where you go ‘where is the card?’”

On top of that, Sarah recalls that the lack of visibility to view all transactions on each card plus the inability to drill down on transaction details, resulted in more time-consuming expense receipt management work.

Sarah: “One of the things that were missing for us is that ability to be able to see all the transactions on the card to be able to know, okay, great, I've got a receipt I need to attach for that particular transaction. Previously, I'd been sending out spreadsheets to every one of the cardholders going ‘ Here’s all the 10 different transactions that are missing that we need your receipts for.’”

With Paytron being a part of Stone & Chalk’s ecosystem, Michael and Sarah found themselves by chance, complaining about their expense management challenges to the Paytron team. It was then that they discovered Paytron’s corporate credit card solution with built-in expense management that would help resolve all their challenges instantly.  

The Solution: More visibility and control over individual corporate cards and detailed employee expense management

Stone & Chalk Group cites four main reasons for switching to Paytron for corporate cards:

1. Increased visibility over every employee expense

‍Michael: “One of the greatest things is, I get pure visibility over everything. I can open a dashboard and I can see every card, every limit, every person, and where they are on that card. I can change the settings; I can do whatever I need. So, from a governance point of view, as a CEO, it's an absolute dream.

2. Ability to manage individual corporate card limits

‍Sarah: “One of the many benefits is the ease with which we can manage the cards, and how the managers of the employees can see what's going on in terms of the spend on their cards. So being able to check in easily, manage their teams, and manage the credit card limits on the cards. For example, if there is one particular person within the team that needs their card limit increased because they've got a big event that's going on, and they need more bandwidth on the card, easy, great. Two minutes, you can go in and update and change that.”

Michael: “I think for me, because I travel a lot and I constantly have to pull out a card and whether it's a taxi, when I can't get an Uber or it's a hotel or whatever, just to be able to have something that's issued on my phone and ready to go. And if I need to top it up, we can go into the dashboard and we can see where it is and we can top up the account. We can do all kinds of things. We can pay it down. We can be incredibly flexible with it. The flexibility of the process for me is, is the big benefit.”

3. Being able to instantly issue, pause, or cancel cards, eliminating long wait times

‍Michael: “You know, it took three months to get my credit card from a major bank and it, well, Sarah will tell you later exactly how long it took to get a card through Paytron, but we measure it in minutes, not months.”

Sarah: “We were trying to roll out a card to one of our team who was travelling the next day and we managed to get a Paytron card on their phone within 30 minutes from start to end. And that to me was something that I could never and still can’t ever imagine a traditional bank being able to do. So really for us it was that ease with which we could do that and do it so quickly, and for them as well to be able to. ‘Okay, great, I've had to go on an impromptu business trip, I need to be able to pay for things.’ How do I make it easy for them? I could do that with the card just like that.

And it was fantastic for them. Just feeling like, oh, okay cool. I've got a card already and I can now put all the expenses related to the trip directly on the card. So that was such a win for us.”

Michael: “But the other thing is, it really does go back to employee experience. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is building world class experience, both for our innovation community, but also for our own employees. And so when somebody starts with us and they walk in the door and they can have a card ready to go before probably their laptop is set up, what an amazing difference that makes. And so from an employee value proposition, it's off the charts”

4. No more chasing for receipts

‍Sarah: “All of the line items, every single thing that you spend on your particular card, it shows up easily on the web and also on the app on your phone. You can see all of your transactions. Upload your receipt, code your receipt. We have Xero, so it integrates with Xero - you can code your receipt and then, in terms of the Finance team, they review it and then submit it into Xero and away it goes. It is so simple. Oh my gosh, it's taken away all these headaches that we used to have of chasing people trying to get receipts out of them. Just fantastic.”

When asked about the Paytron experience

Sarah: “From being able to onboard, we had started off originally with, I think it was 6 of our team that had cards and now I think currently have 15. And aiming to move another 10 more onto our digital cards and just the ease with which we can actually get people onboard and to be able to get cards in their hands has been absolutely amazing. Just totally blown away in terms of my concepts of traditional banking. Just completely blown away. Fantastic.”

Learn more about Paytron corporate credit cards.