Stories by Zinaida

About

Stories by Zinaida is a live entertainment creative agency specialising in curating and programming entertainment for large-scale festivals, ceremonies, and VIP galas. Whatever the event, they have the expertise and resources to turn creative entertainment visions into reality. From cool costume innovations to diverse choreography, their talented team brings every performance to life with precision.

The Problem

Difficulty in allocating different expenses to different projects 

The company previously relied on a mix of cash, personal credit cards, and company credit cards to make business payments. Because of the limitations of traditional methods, the company faced the following challenges: 

1. Expense Tracking and Project Allocation: The team was able to make payments on time, but they had trouble matching receipts to specific projects, especially during busy times. With multiple projects happening at once, this created confusion and made it hard to find out the net expenses for each project.

2. Expense visibility: The company makes costumes, which require many payments for items like fabrics, beading materials, and shoes. Different team members paid in different ways – either their personal cards or petty cash, which led to a lack of a central payment system and made it difficult to see all expenses clearly.
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3. Expense reconciliation: Since employees used different payment methods, reconciling expenses at the end of the month created extra work for both the spenders and the finance team.

The Solution

Uniformity in payments and visibility of expenses

Zinaida adopted Alaan to help manage the costume department's expenses more effectively. Here is how corporate cards helped the team:

Uniformity in Payments: The team now uses their corporate cards for business payments instead of personal cards and petty cash. All 13 team members have their own cards, creating consistency in how all payments are made. This change also saves time by reducing the need for manual reconciliation at the end of each month.

Keep Track of Expenses: The expense management platform helps the team easily track expenses for specific projects, even when they are working on multiple projects at the same time. This fixes the previous problem of linking expenses to the right project.

Centralised Expense Management: The platform gathers all company expenses in one place to provide a clear view of spending. Department heads can check at any time how much money is being spent on each project.

Conclusion

Using corporate cards and expense management software has significantly improved Stories by Zinaida's expense management processes. The use of sub-wallets and tags has streamlined project accounting, provided greater visibility, and simplified reconciliation. 

The only remaining challenge is that a few vendors still rely on cash rather than digital methods. Apart from these payments, everything is being paid by corporate cards and recorded in the platform in real-time. 

Have similar problems while managing your company’s expenses? Explore Alaan. We have got a solution for you! Book a free demo here.