Customer Success
Household Capital Moves Beyond Legacy Bank Cards to Put Expenses in Cardholders’ Hands
How Household Capital’s Finance team gave expense ownership back to 20 cardholders and won back two days of admin every month.
The Challenge
A growing team and a legacy bank card setup were quietly turning Household Capital's Finance function into everyone else's expense desk. Across staff split between Melbourne and Sydney, receipts piled up through the month, transactions sat uncoded, and Finance Manager David Knott's team was stuck doing work that should really have sat with the cardholders themselves.
On top of that, without a prompt at the point of purchase, cardholders only dealt with receipts when finance came knocking and even then, it usually took two or three follow-ups to get a response. David's accountant had quietly become everyone's expense desk by default, and David knew that wasn't the job he was hired to do.
"There's one person in my team who'd historically been kind of like, 'Oh well, I can just do it.' And I had to say — no, no, no. Your job is not to code for everyone. Your job is not being everyone's PA."
David Knott Finance Manager, Household Capital
The Solution
David rolled out Archa to replace the fragmented bank setup with a single platform with individually assigned cards, real-time receipt capture through the Archa app, and a live data feed into Xero. Push notifications now hit the cardholder's phone the moment a transaction lands, prompting them to attach the receipt on the spot.
For the transactions that never come with one such as public transport tap-ons, bank fees, recurring digital subscriptions, the "no receipt" function lets cardholders still code and own them, instead of bouncing them back to finance to interpret.
The Results
The change has been the biggest business win David's team has seen in years. The credit card process now takes roughly half the time it used to, freeing up a day or two of admin every month. Cardholders wrap up in five to ten minutes a month what used to take weeks of chasing and David's accountant has stopped being the fallback for everyone else's admin.
"It's reduced my and the finance team's admin time by making cardholders take responsibility for their receipts. They are willingly taking responsibility of submitting expenses on a timely basis, so we don't have to chase up or do the work for them."
David Knott Finance Manager, Household Capital
There has also been a marked increase in receipts being lodged at the point of purchase rather than batched into a month-end scramble, and the constant back-and-forth over uncoded transactions has largely disappeared from the team's workload.
“With our old system, we did not have people buying a coffee and doing it there and then, it was a full month-end process. That has now completely changed."
David Knott Finance Manager, Household Capital
