With its start in the 1970s in Racine, Wisconsin, as a small travel agency with four employees, Meetings & Incentives Worldwide (M&IW) has grown through its commitment to superb service with the opening of global offices, expanding the incentive and conference divisions, leveraging the most effective and innovative event technologies, and more. Today, the company employs a team of hundreds, has more than quintupled its average annual revenues, and continues to grow at an impressive rate year after year.
Remarkable expansion can’t help but introduce fresh challenges. One such challenge for a company like M&IW is managing the billing of project expenses for more than 3,000 events annually. M&IW bills each event to its clients individually and, while some programs have only a few vendors, others may have hundreds which require a plethora of documentation, making the process complex.
The Challenge: A Billing Process in Need of Streamlining
“We spend millions of dollars annually on event-related expenses and 95% of those costs are billable to our clients. While we could enter invoices into our SAP Concur system and align them with each expense, we still had to save them separately, meaning getting the back-up we needed required a manual process for every expense processed through Concur. That’s a significant time burden, especially since most expenses are tied to billable work with specific job numbers,” said Carla Donahue, senior director of finance for M&IW.
At M&IW, there is an event manager assigned to each event. That person is responsible for making sure every expense is valid before approving it and submitting it into the Concur platform. Then an internal auditor pulls the backup report, aligning it with the invoice the event manager submitted to ensure what the client is being billed for matches the backup that was submitted and approved.
“Our clients get a summarized invoice from us with the actual vendor backup. There can be five line items or 50 line items depending on how many vendors are involved in that particular event,” said Donahue. “For example, if we’re billing for hotel expenses, they need to see the actual hotel invoice that’s submitted in Concur as their backup. With the number of events that we bill, and the amount of backup we had to pull out of the system, doing this manually became overwhelming and time consuming. We needed to find a solution.”
The Solution: A Game Changer for Finance
After using another solution that didn’t 100% solve the issue, the M&IW team was excited when their SAP Concur rep introduced its partner, Pivot Payables, a fintech company delivering corporate financial operations solutions, and a solution offered by Pivot Payables that would solve the accurate tracking of billable expenses. PivotPrime uses all the Concur data, including receipt images and discrete project details, to automatically create statements for each client and project.
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Additionally, PivotPrime includes all the expense types that are used with Concur, aligning with how the budget works for a particular event. Event managers and internal auditors only have to log in, enter the parameters for the billing period, and pull this information by the job number to get the information needed, or generate the statements in real time. Access can be granted to both internal and external users, with the company able to control exactly what users see.
As an added plus, the Pivot team is also able to build custom reports a company requests, compiling individual data elements like invoice numbers, payment methods, and more into the reports.
“With the amount of backup that we pull out of our system, I can’t stress enough how enormous the ability to assemble the backup documentation so easily is for our organization,” said Donahue.
The Results: Accurate Tracking of Billable Expenses
Adopting PivotPrime made it possible for M&IW to transition from 100% manual to 100% automated project invoicing, benefiting every person in the workflow, especially the client. Now, when final invoices are created for each client, the needed backup is there, covering everything from airfare, hotel accommodations, food and beverage, and ground transportation, as well as the destination managers’ expenses if they travel for the program. Better yet, instead of multiple files, clients receive a single file with all the information needed to authorize and pay.
M&IW’s 375 current users (AR team preparing bills) of PivotPrime also appreciate that information does not have to be accessed from multiple places. All users can pull whatever is needed from one place at any time of the day to review billable expenses, run reports for internal research, or do sporadic updates on a budget throughout the lifecycle of the event to ensure all costs are accounted for. If an event manager is assigned to a new program, someone else can jump in and help them with the leftover reporting. Additionally, PivotPrime’s ease of use makes it possible for an employee without training to log in and use the app with minimal, if any, support.
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While PivotPrime has produced critical results for M&IW when it comes to significant time savings, the partnership with Pivot Payables has reaped benefits as well. The SAP Concur platform offers M&IW sophisticated cost tracking, supports client and project designations at granular levels, and provides great flexibility in the reporting process. It was simply the access to backup reporting that was the challenge for M&IW.
The value in PivotPrime is that it uses all the Concur data, including receipt images and discrete project details, to create statements for each client and project on demand. Users simply log in, enter the parameters for the billing period and the statements generate in real time.
“Once we had the ability to pull the backup we needed so easily out of the system, we knew Pivot Payables was going to be our partner for the long term—and we haven’t looked back. They are a collaborative partner and, in a business like ours with so many moving parts, that is huge. When the Pivot team has ideas on how to help us be more efficient, they proactively consult with us to make sure we get the information we need,” said Donahue.
“When you are looking at the bottom line for your organization, you have to stay efficient and make sure all your processes flow and you are not spending useless amounts of hours trying to organize things. That is what we appreciate most about PivotPrime. We now have an expense management solution to support the end-to-end invoicing process with the ability to capture, assign and then bill back for client project expenses.”
When the FICP 2020 event was postponed due to a global pandemic, CSI DMC reimagined the planned reception in a virtual format that allowed guests to explore the Cathedral interactively. The experience included navigable spaces, live performances, mixology segments, storytelling and lounge layouts placed into the virtual environment. “It demonstrated creativity under constraint and preserved partner relationships through a difficult moment in the industry,” Feingold said.
What does that mean for corporate meeting professionals looking to create their own dramatic moments? “We are building something more strategic with our partners,” she said. National team leaders have an ongoing relationship with a limited number of clients rather than being the last call after everything has been booked. “We are able to get to know our accounts and their needs and help them plan ahead. We are much more hands-on connecting people, moments and ideas,” she said.
Each reception took its influence from its respective location and ran with it to the delight of attendees; they got into the action with help from Pinterest boards sent in advance with attire suggestions. 
