Remote workforce meal programs that eliminate expense report reimbursements

Our expense reimbursement process was so broken our operations manager threatened to quit and honestly I didn’t blame her. We have 340 field employees submitting meal expenses, that’s roughly 5,000 receipts monthly that one person was trying to process while also handling everything else, I found her working at 9pm on a thursday and realized we’d created an unsustainable situation.

I told her to take a week off, I’d fix it. I spent that week talking to finance and our expense management vendor about alternatives, corporate cards felt too broad, needed something meal-specific with controls. Tested prepaid platforms like compt, benepass and hoppier, we chose hoppier for their easy set up and we load amounts upfront, restrict merchant categories, get real-time visibility and launched 6 months ago. The results, operations manager processing time dropped from 120 hours monthly to under 10 and field employees happy because instant access instead of 3 week reimbursement wait. We’re spending less because utilization is 68%, not everyone uses full daily amount. And unexpected benefit was unused daily amounts return to budget monthly, we’re recovering what we would’ve been paid out in reimbursements before.

We used some of that savings to give operations manager a raise because she’d been dealing with that disaster for way too long and deserved recognition for not actually quitting. Sometimes fixing operational problems is about admitting the current process is broken and finding something better, we should’ve done this 2 years ago but at least it’s solved now.