Author: Amrita Gurney

There was a point when it seemed the pandemic would break Fresh Tracks Canada, a Vancouver-based travel-agency — a fate faced by many businesses and industries in those tough times. As it happened, navigating the challenges helped the company thrive.

That is because, despite a more than twenty-year track record of delivering stellar personalized travel experiences across Canada, many of the company’s processes and systems had fallen out of date. Then the pandemic hit, and the company was forced to lay off more than half of its staff. 

“The pandemic was chaos, but chaos brings opportunity,” says the company’s Director of Finance, Robert O’Herlihy. “We broke down a lot of our systems and processes and rebuilt them up during the pandemic to be more efficient, and we’re seeing the rewards of that right now.”

Bringing A Travel Agency into the Digital Age

O’Herlihy says that the company emerged from the pandemic under new management with a mandate to operationalize new technology projects to drive productivity. For the accounting team, the area most ripe for improvement was payments. 

O’Herlihy explains that in the hospitality industry just about everything runs on credit cards, from hotel and tour bookings to employee expenses and even overhead costs. Overall, he estimates about half of the company’s transactions go through credit cards, which often racked up six-figure statements, with thousands of transactions requiring manual reconciliation. 

To make matters more complicated, Fresh Tracks Canada used one provider for its physical cards and another for virtual cards, of which they required many. 

“The process we used was to assign a new virtual card to every booking,” O’Herlihy says. “Customer service would apply for a card, which had to be approved by finance — so inevitably there was a time lag before someone sees and approves it — then it goes back to customer service so they could book the hotels and tours and other components.” 

Not only was the process itself inefficient for customer service staff, but it was also a nightmare for the accounting team, who had to chase staff for receipts and spend hours comparing them against bookings. As the company emerged from the pandemic with a mandate to find modern solutions, O’Herlihy says Float seemed like the most obvious fit. 

“It seemed to have a lot more features than other options on the market,” he says. “Some of them had receipt matching but didn’t allow us to add a description [to each transaction], or they might not integrate with our accounting system — Float just seemed like the full package of features we wanted.” 

One Platform, Many Solutions

Fresh Tracks Canada began using Float in August of 2022, following what O’Herlihy describes as a seamless onboarding process. 

“The integrations with our online banking and to our accounting software Xero were very easy, there was no custom API needed, it was plug and play essentially,” he says. “The system itself is also pretty intuitive, there wasn’t a lot of training that we had to give to the teams.” 

O’Herlihy adds that reception at Fresh Tracks Canada was “overwhelmingly positive” because Float provided a degree of autonomy and efficiency that had been lacking previously. 

“They don’t have to seek approvals, we don’t have to chase them for receipts; it’s all kind of self-managed,” he says. “When someone’s name is on a card, they’re more likely to manage it correctly, but we can set approvals in Float as well.” 

Within the accounting team O’Herlihy says life has gotten a lot easier now that all the company’s cards are managed in one system, including their U.S. dollar transactions, of which the travel company processes many. In fact, O’Herlihy says the company is saving thousands on American transaction fees alone, but cash savings wasn’t even the biggest benefit of the transition. 

“Time savings is the biggest one, like operational efficiencies, because we’re enabling our Legendary Hospitality team to take ownership and accountability of their own spending,” he says. “Getting the Float system in place was a big win for us, especially because it integrates with our accounting software, so there’s no manual entry into our accounting system — it’s all uploaded automatically.” 

How Float Improves Supplier Relations

In fact, O’Herlihy says that the change has even had a positive impact on the company’s relationship with its suppliers, as Fresh Tracks Canada can now issue virtual cards with spending limits to tour operators directly. 

“We give them a dedicated virtual supplier card, so ‘here’s a Visa, it’s got a limit of $5,000 or whatever it might, whenever you serve our clients feel free to charge that,’” he explains. “That builds trust with them and good relationships with them, and they know they won’t have any problems dealing with us.” 

While the pandemic nearly ended the now 26-year-old business, O’Herlihy says it ultimately made it stronger. These days Fresh Tracks Canada is back to its pre-pandemic headcount, even hiring back many of the staff it previously let go, and is now on track to surpass pre-pandemic revenues. 

“We’re striving to play our part in facilitating more efficient operations across the board, not just in the finance department, which is where the idea of using Float was born,” he says. “We kind of became a little stagnant before the pandemic, and in hindsight tearing down the system and rebuilding it was the best thing for the company.”

About Fresh Tracks Canada

Vancouver-based Fresh Tracks Canada has been creating personalized Canadian vacations since 1996. Their team has explored the country — because they love to travel too — and have used this insider knowledge to create more than 25,000 personalized trip itineraries.

Find Fresh Tracks Canada at www.freshtrackscanada.com. You can also book tours and vacations operated by the Fresh Tracks Canada team at www.canadiantrainvacations.com and www.northernlightscanada.com.

Fresh Prep’s ad hoc employee expense management system worked fine in the early start-up days, but as the company expanded the meal kit provider was hungry for a more robust solution. 

Founded by three friends in Vancouver in 2014, Fresh Prep now boasts more than 430 employees and operations in both Alberta and British Columbia, with plans for further eastward expansion.

How Company Cards Keep the Lights On For Small Businesses

When Shannon Lee joined the company roughly five years ago, she says the organization leaned heavily on two small pieces of plastic. 

“We had two company cards, and there weren’t any names attached, so it was really hard to get a hold of any records or receipts, which becomes a particular problem when we have an audit, which happens once a year,” she says. “We had a lot of issues identifying who was responsible for the transactions we were seeing.” 

Lee, who gradually rose the ranks from customer service to her current position as a staff accountant, says up to 10 staff members might use the same card in a given month, and their access to funds was vital for fulfilling orders and paying bills on time. 

“We have our grocery suppliers, and we do typically pay by EFT or ACH, however a lot of times when we need top-ups for whatever reason — if one ingredient is short — we need to do store runs, so the card comes in handy for those,” she says. “Sometimes digital ads [providers] don’t accept any payment methods other than cards, and our digital spends are typically pretty high.” 

Fresh Prep’s reliance on card transactions can also push their monthly spending needs well into the six-figures, which Lee says banks weren’t always happy to provide, often requiring additional paperwork of collateral. Furthermore, all this spending on two cards made it hard to know who was responsible for what. 

“We used the vendor information to kind of guess what the spending could be, there was just no other choice,” she says. “I’ll be honest, a lot of the time if we couldn’t find out exactly what the expenses were we had to move on.” 

When Startup Solutions Don’t Fit a Grown-Up Company

While the ad hoc approach worked well enough in the start-up years Lee says it became obvious they needed to find a better solution for managing employee expenses after Fresh Prep expanded beyond its provincial borders. 

“Employees in Alberta we didn’t know at the time were buying all these things because you need a lot to get a manufacturing plant started, so it took months before we could reconcile most of these transactions,” she says. “It was chaotic.” 

At that point Lee says the company realized that it would need to find a better solution before attempting any further expansion. Though she wasn’t part of the selection process herself, Lee suspects that Fresh Prep chose Float for the ability to assign virtual and physical cards to individual users, finally bringing transparency, oversight and greater organization to its expense management practices. 

“Our bookkeeper loves it, because she knows exactly who to ask [about company spend]; even if we’re missing receipts, we can hold someone accountable for those transactions,” she says. 

Lee adds that implementing Float in early 2022 proved very straightforward, thanks to its user-friendly interface and strong customer service. 

“We really enjoyed how intuitive the Float platform is — it’s very user friendly — which was really nice, especially when we were used to these classic banking institution interfaces that are frankly really outdated and made it difficult to get a hold of data; Float just offered it to us on a platter,” she says. “The customer service is also really awesome. The wait times aren’t very long, everyone seems very friendly, and it’s easy to talk to customer service — they seem to know what they’re doing.” 

How a More User-Friendly Solution Facilitates a More Friendly Workplace

An additional benefit Fresh Prep enjoyed once switching to Float include a high spending limit without any of the headaches imposed by their previous providers.

Lee however suggests that perhaps the greatest benefit was the ability to change the finance team’s relationship with their colleagues. That’s because Float lets them set merchant and category restrictions, spending limits, and even generate one-time use cards for specific purchases, letting employees spend freely while maintaining even higher security, reporting, and oversight standards. 

“We really enjoy letting our employees not have to spend and get reimbursed; we’re able to set a limit and give them the room to make purchases on behalf of the company,” Lee says. “We’re able to give them a bit of autonomy, but at the same time we also don’t have to risk the company possibly losing money due to transactions that shouldn’t have gone out, or transactions that we can’t track.” 

When asked whether the company could pursue its ambitious growth plans without this level of spending insight and control, Lee says the answer is “an absolute no.” 

“Having the means to be able to make those transactions definitely makes us feel more confident in our ability to grow,” she says. “Knowing that Float will be there when we expand in the future gives those of us on the finance team more security knowing we will be able to track every transaction along the way.” 

About Fresh Prep

Vancouver-based Fresh Prep joined the meal-kit industry to serve busy Canadians with a focus on reducing packaging waste and providing fresher, quality ingredients. Find Fresh Prep at www.freshprep.ca.

When James Lemon moved from Calgary to Vancouver, he took the first accounting job he could find. Fifteen years later, he remains with the same employer, Surrey B.C.’s SPI Logistics.

“Honestly, I just sort of fell into it,” he says. “Logistics is a very interesting world because it’s way behind the times, it’s just starting to catch up, technology-wise, so it creates a lot of interesting challenges; there’s always something new and interesting to learn and deal with.” 

During that time Lemon gradually climbed the ranks from junior accountant to his current position as VP of finance and CFO. While he says a lot has changed since he first joined the team much of the innovation has occurred in just the last few years. 

“Five years ago, most companies in the logistics space were still writing things on spreadsheets,” he says. “With COVID we saw a major shift from physical cheques to electronic payment.”

Embracing Innovation in a Traditional Industry

Prior to the pandemic Lemon says he wrote checks for “virtually everything,” from office supplies to employee expenses, and paid its network of vendors using a single corporate card, both of which posed significant challenges and liabilities.

“If for some reason my card had ever been compromised, we would have had to go to dozens of vendors trying to get our corporate card information updated before they try to run another transaction,” he said. “Our bank requires two signatures for every cheque, so especially during the pandemic when nobody was together anymore it was really difficult.”

In hindsight Lemon says there were a lot of reasons to upgrade SPI’s spend management system, but admits that one of the things that first attracted him to Float was the ability to log expenses and generate reports simply by taking a picture of the receipt.

“Before we moved to Float I hadn’t received a receipt from our VP of sales in four months, and so when I started researching and found Float and saw it gave us the ability to text images of receipts, that right there was a godsend itself,” he said.

Soon after, in November of 2022, SPI Logistics onboarded the solution, which Lemon says proved “seamless.”

“We went with the Pro version, so I had a dedicated person help me do the initial set up, and the system was super intuitive,” he said. “We had another call scheduled for a couple of days later to see if I needed any more help, but I already had it all set up and running before that call was supposed to take place.”

The Benefits Keep on Rolling

Pretty soon, however, Lemon says he began discovering extra perks that made him wish he had signed on earlier. For example, he says that each of the many cheques the company issued cost about $20 to clear, while its company cards were processing about one million dollars a year without any added benefits.

The switch has turned a two-hour monthly card expense reconciliation process into a 20-minute activity, creating time savings for the team.

“One of the other offerings we didn’t realize was going to be such a benefit was the fact that they have Canadian and U.S. dollar cards,” he says. “Now when we travel to the States rather than paying the 3% fee the bank charges on every U.S. dollar card transaction, we can now pay the actual exchange rate.”

So far this year, Lemon estimates Float has saved SPI Logistics $10,000 in U.S. dollar conversion fees alone, but the benefits don’t stop there, either. He adds that when Float launched its virtual corporate card program earlier this year it immediately proved massively beneficial.

That’s because previously non-executives of the 35-person organization had to dip into their own pockets when traveling to conferences and events. The new feature, however, allowed Lemon to generate virtual cards in minutes, set merchant and category restrictions, spending limits, and even generate one-time use cards.

“In today’s economy lots of people don’t have lots of extra money to spend a few hundred dollars on a work trip to hopefully get paid back within one to two weeks,” he says. “Now with the ability to offer virtual cards from their phones, we can issue small temporary cards to the employees who are traveling, which makes their lives easier, and makes our life easier, because I get all the receipts electronically.”

Taking The Risks Out of Vendor Payments

Furthermore, all those vendor payments that used to come from Lemon’s corporate card have been replaced with a new system that assigns each vendor their own card, meaning that if one is compromised the others won’t be affected.   

“One of our executive cards did get compromised, and Float caught it right away, and disabled the card automatically, without us having to do anything,” he says. “That was hugely beneficial so that we weren’t dealing with any fraudulent transactions.”

Lemon adds that innovations like Float are part of what keeps his work feeling fresh fifteen years after taking the first job he could find. 

“Being able to embrace new technology and new ideas keeps things interesting,” he says. “If you work at a company that isn’t doing that, it’s really hard to stick with something for 15 years.”

About SPI Logistics

For over 40 years, SPI has been a leading firm providing a dedicated transportation network and third-party logistics hub to shippers, receivers, and carriers. Find SPI Logistics at www.spi3pl.com.

Much of Stef MacDiarmid’s life has been shaped by Black Feather, a Canadian wilderness adventure company that specializes in expeditions to Canada’s north.

Not only has it been her employer for the last ten years, but it’s also how she met her now husband, Ken, with whom she shares a two-and-a-half-year-old, and a second child due in December.

“I had been working as a head instructor of a canoe and kayak school and ended up wanting to get back to my roots in canoeing, so I contacted Black Feather,” says MacDiarmid. “Each year they do a guide warmup, and my husband had already been working with them for a number of years, so it was in that guide warmup that we ended up meeting each other, and then paddling together for the first time; I guess you could say the rest is history.”

Bringing a legacy business into the digital age

After a decade working side by side — first as guides and later in management — the husband-and-wife team took over Black Feather as co-owners earlier this year. At the time the duo felt it was their responsibility to shepherd the now 50-year-old business into the 21^st century. One area most ripe for improvement, according to MacDiarmid, was the company’s process for expense reimbursement and tracking.

“Everything was manual; each guide was given an advance for whatever expenses they needed to procure on whatever trip they were guiding, and we asked them to keep hard copy of the receipts, and a hard copy hand-written expense form, and mail those back to our head office, where our bookkeeper would sort through them,” she says. “It was painfully slow, the receipts would get damaged, we’d have to follow up with people all the time, and sometimes not get them back because someone had lost them, misplaced them, or was poor at getting stuff back.”

At the time MacDiarmid, who now serves as director as well as co-owner, says the team of four full time staff and three part-time helpers dedicated significant time and resources to managing the expenses of between 50 and 60 guides, who lead between 60 and 100 trips each year.

To make matters more difficult, the nature of the work meant paper receipts were commonly lost, damaged, or misplaced. During peak season guides may only have a few days between trips, and often didn’t have time to fill out expense reports before their next expedition. This ultimately created a range of challenges for Black Feather when it came to financial management.

“Forecasting and actually having an idea of how we’re doing in terms of profitability to make decisions about gear-buying for the following season was the biggest challenge,” MacDiarmid says. “I need to order canoes in August for the following year, and I could be spending $15,000 to $30,000 on canoes, but I wouldn’t know if it made sense to spend that money, because I didn’t know what our profit was going to be at the end of the year, so I couldn’t budget properly.”

Finding one solution that met a range of needs

MacDiarmid spent some time exploring potential solutions with her accounting team, and ultimately chose Float for its unique approach to expense management, seamless onboarding and integrations, and high level of customer service. Specifically, MacDiarmid says she was most interested in Float’s Spend Management features, which allowed her to distribute physical and digital company cards to her team, while having the ability to set limits, controls, and custom approval policies.

“We were looking at other platforms that helped us track expenses, but it was still going to be out of pocket for people,” she says. “Float allowed them to have a company card without the hassle at the bank and the extra fee for each of those cards.”

MacDiarmid adds that Float gave Black Feather’s guides access to the funds they needed to run expeditions without dipping into their own bank accounts, while providing the company with real-time financial visibility, oversight, and security. It also saved its guides and accountants countless hours of manual expense tracking and filling through Float’s Automated receipt collection and Accounting integrations.

“Especially with the integration and being able to export directly to Xero, that saves a ton of manual data input,” MacDiarmid says. “Not only is the spend tracked in a way where I can go and look at who spent what whenever I want to audit a little bit better and have that insight, but because we can export automatically to Xero it means our overall manual woman-hours ends up being drastically reduced.”

Ongoing improvements add more value

MacDiarmid notes that onboarding Float proved relatively seamless, adding there have already been several meaningful improvements to the product since Black Feather began using it just six months ago.

“The onboarding for me felt really good — there was lots of transparency in how things were set up and how they would work best for us — and there have been a few improvements as we’ve been rolling through,” she says. “One is having more than one account linked, so I don’t need to log out of one to log into the other… and the same thing with the expense reimbursement rollout; that felt like an added bonus within the program.”

MacDiarmid has also been impressed with Float’s customer service, and its ability to meet the needs of its large and diverse community of guides.

“If we have an issue and we don’t know how to solve something, the support comes quickly, and in a really great solution-oriented manner,” she says. “It has essentially saved us a huge headache and time wasted and a lot of manual data entry. That is not where we want to be at this point, so we’re very happy with the switchover.”

Getting ready for the next generation

Though she would love to see her children take over the business someday MacDiarmid says she and her husband don’t want to pressure them into it, either. No matter who takes the reins next, however, MacDiarmid feels a strong responsibility to pass along a stronger and more financially sound Black Feather, and not just because of its place in her family’s story.  

“We’re at an interesting crossroads right now in terms of tourism and travel and climate change,” she says. “When you experience a place, you’re much more interested in conserving it, and much more connected to the land and the water and the people.”   

Finding new, more efficient ways of operating, adds MacDiarmid, is the best way to ensure Black Feather remains a strong conduit to Canada’s northern communities.

About Black Feather

For over 50 years, Black Feather adventurers have paddled wilderness rivers, hiked remote landscapes, and sea kayaked along pristine coastlines and through sparkling fjords. Find Black Feather at www.blackfeather.com.