Fever-Tree adopts Navan for control and proactive travel and expense management

Since its foundation in 2005, Fever-Tree has become the mixer of choice in the 74 countries where it’s sold. The company uses only the best ingredients and endeavours to replicate this high quality in every part of its operations. Before Navan, Fever-Tree used a UK travel provider that required phone bookings, so employees tended to go off-platform. This left the finance team in the dark on travel spend, an issue that grew as the company expanded globally. Fever-Tree desired one platform for travel and expense (T&E) management and chose Navan as the perfect tonic to its challenges.

Before Navan

Little visibility and reactive in nature

Before Navan, Fever-Tree's finance team lacked real-time visibility of T&E spend. Not only were employees booking off-platform, but the travel policy was kept in a static document and expenses weren't submitted until days or weeks after trips.

Managers had to manually check each expense against the policy. “It was a labour-intensive process to check all the claims and was always after the event,” remembers Ben Lenehan, Financial Director of Operations at Fever-Tree.

With no central source of travel data and no real-time insights, Fever-Tree was unable to track traveller whereabouts, hindering its duty of care.

The manual booking and reporting process also meant the finance team struggled to pinpoint which employees were spending most on travel, limiting the ability to make cost-saving changes.

Inefficient expense process

The expense process was slow, clunky, and highly manual. Employees had to itemise individual expenses, and this inefficient process put employees off doing expense reports, meaning the finance team often got expenses late or incomplete.

The finance team wasted valuable time chasing employees for receipts and missing information as it dealt with the backlog of expenses.

“

"Before Navan, our travel and expense processes were reactive. We didn’t know what employees had spent until after the fact and relied on individuals to control spend. With Navan, we can control costs and expenses in real time and proactively manage how employees pay for trips."

Ben Lenehan

Financial Director – Operations

Why Fever-Tree chose Navan

As a dynamic, forward-thinking brand, Fever-Tree recognised its T&E processes weren’t up to scratch.

From its new provider, it wanted greater visibility and control of spend, and a simplified expense process that saved time for its finance team and employees across the company.

During the assessment process, Navan stood out as the only true all-in-one solution in the market. Rather than piecing together T&E software from different providers, Navan has built everything natively on one platform, simplifying the experience from end to end.

Ben says Navan has streamlined T&E processes as it expands globally: “As we grew, we found we were setting up new corporate card schemes in different countries with different banks. With Navan, we have it all in one platform and issue cards to users in any country — and have all the reporting in one system,” Ben says.

The Navan effect

Travel payments and expense management made easy

Fever-Tree uses Navan Travel Payments for trip bookings and Navan Expense for company expenses. With Navan Travel Payments, a virtual card is generated for each booking, so employees can pay for and expense a trip in one click and don’t pay out of pocket. All transactions are automatically reconciled and synced with the ERP, so Ben’s team doesn’t have to carry out a cumbersome reconciliation process.

Richer data and big savings

Navan’s automated travel payments and expense solution also saves Fever-Tree travellers time, as they no longer have to gather their receipts post-trip and manually upload them for flights, hotels, and other expenses.

Ben’s team members now get real-time T&E data, so they can monitor company-wide spend and track it across specific departments and individuals. The team can then easily tweak the policy in response to spending patterns and create detailed reports in minutes.

Dynamic travel policies and 24/7 support

Since launching Navan, Fever-Tree has enjoyed a superior travel experience. Travellers book trips in minutes and easily see when a travel option is out of policy, improving booking compliance.

Previously, the travel policy had static price limits for flight and hotel bookings. Now, Navan’s dynamic price policies mean Fever-Tree is able to know the fair market rate for a hotel at any given time, “so we understand the true cost of a hotel in New York versus a hotel in Munich or Sydney,” Ben says.

When on trips, travellers can access in-app travel agent support 24/7/365 to make, change, or cancel bookings, which is vital given that Fever-Tree has offices across the globe.

Secure subscription payments

Fever-Tree uses Navan purchase cards for recurring software subscriptions. These virtual payment cards have a set budget allocated to a single merchant, so Ben’s team has full control of spend, visibility of outgoing payments, and the peace of mind that they won’t go over budget. It’s far more secure than the previous approach to managing subscriptions.

The benefits Fever-Tree is seeing

Since implementing Navan’s end-to-end T&E solution, Fever-Tree employees have enjoyed a range of benefits: 

Finance team:

• Sees company-wide T&E spend in real time in one centralised platform
• Gets detailed programme data insights
• Saves significant time on expenses, which it can dedicate to more valuable tasks

Travellers:

• Book and manage trips quickly and easily
• Earn rewards for booking cost-effectively
• Choose from a broad travel inventory
• Get support in the app whenever they need
• No longer submit manual expense reports

Looking ahead: tweaking and refining

In 18 months with Navan, Fever-Tree travellers have taken 4,500 trips, “so we have a good amount of data to understand where and when we’re travelling and how much it costs, which enables us to better budget and plan for the future,” Ben says.

Ben’s team is also using the platform’s comprehensive data to compare each department’s travel habits and refine the company travel policy for greater savings.

To assist this, Fever-Tree recently activated Navan Rewards, which incentivises travellers to save company money when booking a trip. “We’re excited to see how that could drive cost savings,” says Ben, as employees opt to stay in cheaper hotels to earn rewards.

As the company continues to grow and expand, Ben says Fever-Tree is using Navan to “make sure we’re travelling to the right places at the right time, using our costs most effectively to drive our growth.”