Less admin, more time: How SMEs can stop routine expenses eating into the workday

A TAXI ride to a client meeting may be straightforward. Claiming the expense back is often not. You have to keep the receipt, take a screenshot, submit the claim and then wait for it to be approved and reimbursed.

That used to be the routine for employees at home-grown wellness firm DrinkAid whenever they took a work ride. Until the company started using Grab For Business earlier this year.

And there was a long list of such expenses to keep track of. DrinkAid’s 10-person team was regularly travelling across Singapore for retail meetings and store checks, heading to shoots or events, or using same-day deliveries to send samples and stocks to customers and partners.

Each staff member used to spend around 20 minutes a week managing work-related claims and reimbursements.

At month-end, those expenses would come back to chief executive officer Isaac Lim as screenshots, receipts and claims to review – often while the company was also closing its financial statements.

The sums may have been small, but managing them was taking up valuable time.

Lim spent several hours each month reviewing and approving claims.

“Across 10 people, that’s several hours a week of paid time wasted on admin that added zero value to the business,” he says.

There was another frustration: employees had to pay first and wait to be reimbursed.

“It was unfair on our employees that they were paying for something out of pocket, basically funding our operations, and waiting for weeks to get it back,” says Lim.

Giving employees spending flexibility without losing oversight

But reducing the paperwork was only part of the equation. Lim also needed a way to give employees more autonomy to spend.

“The main problem was that I couldn’t see a way to delegate control of spending without losing oversight,” says Lim.

Now, instead of approving routine expenses one by one, he can set spending rules in advance, including who can book rides or deliveries, for what purpose and up to what limit.

That shifts his role from checking each expense after it happens to deciding the boundaries in advance.

“My sign-off came after the money was already spent, so it wasn’t really a decision – it was paperwork,” he says.

“Now the rules are set upfront, and my team doesn’t have to wait on me for something they already know is fine.”

For DrinkAid staff, the switch did not mean learning a new expense system or carrying a separate corporate card. They could continue using the Grab app, selecting a company tag for eligible work bookings. The expense is then charged to the company account rather than paid out of pocket and claimed later.

Erika Oktora, regional director, self-serve at Grab For Business, says DrinkAid’s experience is common among SMEs in Singapore, which is one of the platform’s fastest-growing SME markets.

“Claims at a lot of SMEs route to one person, so approvals move at the speed of the busiest person in the company - and staff wait on their own money,” says Oktora.

The paperwork, she says, may be “invisible” but it is still real work.

“Chasing photos, reconciling them, remembering which client a ride was for, it never appears in a P&L, so it never gets fixed,” she says about the hidden time cost of routine expense-related paperwork.

Grab For Business moves the control upfront.

At DrinkAid, this has also meant less expense admin piling up at month-end.

Instead of individual claims coming in weeks after the expense was incurred, business rides and deliveries are recorded in one account as they happen.

That gives Lim a clearer view of where money is going earlier. If spending on urgent deliveries starts climbing, for instance, he can rein it in within the month rather than discover it only at month-end when the books are closed.

He can also immediately distinguish spending on client visits, deliveries and sample movements without manually tagging each transaction.

Keeping admin manageable as the business grows

That visibility matters more as DrinkAid grows and the volume of day-to-day expenses increases with it.

Founded in 2020, DrinkAid makes scientifically tested post-alcohol recovery supplements that aim to reduce the after-effects of alcohol consumption. Since then, the home-grown company has broadened its product range, moved into physical retail and partner channels, and expanded beyond Singapore.

That growth has also meant more retail partners to support, more products to move and more day-to-day coordination.

Yet its team remains lean, with staff often wearing multiple hats.

“When you’re working with such a lean team, everyone’s individual bandwidth is a meaningful share of total capacity,” says Lim.

Better management of routine admin gives DrinkAid’s team channel more capacity to focus on product development, partnerships and further expansion.

As the company looks to expand its reach within Singapore and regionally, it will continue to rely on Grab For Business, as the platform can be used in the other seven markets where Grab operates, including Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

“The team can now focus on what matters – spending time on strategy, sourcing, partnerships, product and expansion,” says Lim.

Learn more about managing everyday business expenses with Grab For Business.