Mel Gollan, Founder & CEO, RIP Global
While businesses work hard to provide the best quality services to their customers, one of the biggest obstacles comes from within their own organization: Burdensome administrative tasks, especially related to finance, accounting, and invoice or receipt processing. For the vast majority of businesses today, these expense management processes are managed through physical papers and this means a high carbon footprint, environmental damage, increased use of carcinogenic ink, and increasing costs. Further, these highly time-consuming, labour-intensive, and stressful processes are wholly managed by human workers.
Luckily, businesses do have another choice: To incorporate modern expense management solutions. In this context, one of the all-round best expense management solutions available today is offered by New Zealand’s RIP Global, one of Asia-Pacific’s most advanced expense management solution providers. The company empowers businesses to make expense management as simple and effortless as possible through its powerful hi-tech software. It automates the entire process at the point-of-sale (POS), dramatically reducing costs, as well as completely removing the need for paper and human involvement. Customers just scan their RIP Expenses QR code via a scanner in the merchant which sends their receipt straight through to their phone and their accounting system. Through its simplicity, ease-of-use, innovation, and value for time, the software effectively alleviates one of the biggest burdens that businesses routinely face. This way, people regain precious time to deliver quality services as well as take care of their personal lives and health.
Responding to the Rising Need for Smarter Spend Management Processes
‘RIP’ is an acronym for Receipt, Invoicing and Payments, and signals the end of paper receipts and expense reporting. The company was set up in 2016 by Ms. Mel Gollan, the company’s founder and CEO, in Wellington, New Zealand. After managing business documents and receipts for 10 years—a painstaking, time-consuming and exhausting job—one day, she realized that a manual approach to financial accounting was not sustainable and started looking for a better way. Looking into the purpose and life cycle of receipts, she began developing a hi-tech solution to automate the entire process whilst minimizing human touch. “I reverse engineered the entire process from start to finish—with the goal of never touching a receipt or expense report again. RIP Expenses was born,” Ms. Gollan shares.
From the beginning, the concept seemed radically different to everything else on the market, anywhere in the world, and so they secured extensive global intellectual property and patents for their proprietary software. Over the years, the company has soared, having set up two international offices in the USA and Singapore, and satisfying a variety of diverse customers—from Government clients and the education sector, to FMCG and everything in between.
“We are a small company with big experience in data, security and software building. With extensive merchant management experience, our approach has always been to deliver significant value to everybody in the ecosystem. Our empathic approach to solution design is elegant, simple, and compliant, which are all key factors in removing the #1 most hated task for business spenders—expenses,” Ms. Gollan reflects. The company enjoys a family-like work culture, full of driven, passionate, and focused people changing the world for the better, and putting their customers first.
RIP Expenses Software: Modernizing the Expense Management Process
‘RIP Expenses’ is an intuitive, user-friendly and cloud-based expense management app that completely eliminates receipt, invoice and claims processing. They use QR technology which codes and justifies the business expense when it is made, alongside reconciling the payment data to the purchase data. “Our solution doesn’t require a receipt to be printed or emailed for processing—we fully automate right from the purchase. In our current environment—where contactless is not just about speed of use, it’s also about health and safety for merchants and customers—we are thrilled to help organisations keep their people safe and healthy,” Ms. Gollan says.
RIP Expenses integrates easily with merchants’ POS software and captures all the data, straight from the source. All customers need to do is scan their QR code, pay and their receipts are automatically uploaded into the app. On the other hand, merchants can enjoy benefits like no receipt processing work, faster till transactions and in-app spaces to feature their latest offers and promotions. All the documents are safely stored, tamper-proof, and easily accessible online anywhere and anytime, thanks to cloud technology.
“We capture full line and SKU data giving full transparency across spend and back office controls which are outstanding. Expensing is such a negative investment on behalf of users and companies, by delivering a truly automated experience for the user and the back office—we deliver significant value to both sides of the business,” Ms. Gollan states. Some more features of the software include permitting one-click approvals, generating reports automatically, being 100% compliant with legal requirements for business, allowing full visibility, eliminating fraud and automating a customer’s business rules to boost their efficiency.
Apart from immediate business activities, the increasing use of paper receipts in our society is harmful to the environment. The company’s paperless expense management approach is a meaningful step forward. “One person generates around 2 kgs of waste a year from receipts. Multiply that by New Zealand alone and a whopping 10 million kgs of waste is being produced—purely from receipts. It’s not good for our health, our businesses or our earth, which is why we eliminate it right at the source,” Ms. Gollan shares.
On A Mission to Revolutionize Spend Management in Business
RIP Global’s software has game-changing potential for the business world, benefitting service providers, corporate customers and SME, as well as the environment. Today, the company is actively changing the way businesses manage receipts and expenses, beginning with its clients in New Zealand, Singapore and Australia, while gradually expanding into more countries overseas. “My vision is to deliver our technology at a level where spend management is fully served by our tech, not your people. By fully automating this part of the compliance process, we free up humans to spend their time where it matters most, add value to their organisations, build relationships and promote growth,” Ms. Gollan says.
Over the years, both RIP Global and Ms. Gollan have been recognized for their contributions to the FinTech field. Today, the company is building a borderless presence as they venture into different countries around the world to help organizations deliver true value to their stakeholders, i.e. taxpayers, investors, and customers. “Our company is on a mission to rid the world of receipts and processing. New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia will be up and running with our unique solution by the end of 2021,” Ms. Gollan concludes.