Zoom Speeds Up Expense Reconciliation by Weeks With Navan Travel Payments
An industry leader in modern enterprise video communications, Zoom takes pride in its ability to stay agile in an ever-evolving competitive landscape. Zoom partners with organizations that reflect its own user-centric culture, and works with Navan to take control of its travel program without sacrificing employee experience.
The Finance team at Zoom had developed effective processes that made travel expense reconciliation quick and efficient. However, as any accountant knows, this still means hours of manual work tying refunds, upgrades, and changes back to specific employees and their trips.
Vik Shah, Corporate Controller at Zoom, provided more color on this situation: “One of the things that the Finance team does each month is reconcile travel expenses. While reconciliation has improved substantially with Navan, we still see individual line items come in for things like seat upgrades or refunds that are challenging to tie back to the original flight or hotel purchase.”
Challenges
- •Ancillary charges difficult to tie back to original transaction
- •Reconciliation could take weeks
- •Time consuming monthly close
Results with Navan
- •Monthly reconciliation in under an hour
- •Refocused energy towards higher value strategic initiatives
- •Significantly accelerated monthly close
Getting Time Back
“Everyone who touches accounting knows that reconciliation is an issue, but it was just always one of those ‘acceptable evils’ that you had to deal with. I wasn’t surprised at all when Navan approached me with a possible solution to this problem. What impressed me though, was how effective it is,” Vik explained.
In late 2019, Vik and his team focused on setting up Navan virtual cards to dramatically improve the process of reconciliation. Since then, the solution has resulted in significant wins, most notably giving the team substantial time back to to focus on higher value strategic initiatives and projects. “Navan is a major time saver,” said Vik. “I run a lean team at Zoom, and we have actually been able to reduce reconciliation time from weeks to under an hour each month.”
Natively Integrating With Navan
Navan Travel Payments natively integrates with the core Navan platform, and any corresponding transactions made using the virtual card are automatically associated with the original booking. These line items are instantly auto-tagged with a booking ID, saving the Accounting team from having to manually reconcile that charge or chase after employees for receipts. Now, Vik and his team just briefly review reports instead of conducting full audits.
A True Partner
Navan aims to delight customers at every turn, echoing Zoom’s ethos on user-happiness. This core value caught the attention of Tu Nguyen, Zoom’s AP Analyst, after Navan Travel Payments was rolled out. “While nearly everything was self-service and easy to set up, I was really pleased at how this entire implementation went, as well as the ongoing support we’ve been receiving while rolling out Navan Travel Payments,” Tu said. “I feel like we’re really getting a white-glove experience and I appreciate that they treat us like a true partner.”