How Voodoo Brewery Gained Real-Time Visibility Over Remote Team Spend

Voodoo, a brewpub franchise launched in 2005, operates with a remote-first team of 6–10 employees

For Rick Schmitt, Director of Finance, managing finances meant spending hours sorting through envelopes, PDF receipts, and ad hoc screenshots.

Without a streamlined process, reconciling corporate card expenses and ensuring audit readiness were ongoing operational hurdles.

The Challenges

A Remote Team With Zero Visibility

Each employee had their own corporate card. All six were constantly traveling, which meant that the finance team had to chase down receipts with no insight into what was missing or submitted.

Difficulty Tracking Receipts

With team members always on the move and spread across various locations, obtaining receipts in a timely and consistent manner was nearly impossible. Receipts came in all forms, scattered emails, mailed hard copies, and via apps like Expensify’s free version. The finance team needed all receipts to be stored digitally, searchable, and easily accessible at any moment.

Compliance Concerns

As a franchise company, Voodoo Licensing undergoes rigorous audits annually. But without a system to mandate receipts and enforce policies, ensuring compliance across a remote team was nearly impossible.

Time-Consuming Reconciliation

Since employees used corporate credit cards, Rick had to manually track down transactions, match them with receipts, and ensure nothing was missing.

This cumbersome process consumed 15 hours every month..

The Transformation with Sage Expense Management (formerly Fyle)

Rick needed a tool that would:

• Digitize receipts and centralize storage for audit readiness
• Ensure timely receipt submission from his remote team
• Integrate seamlessly with QuickBooks Online
• Simplify corporate card expense management and matching

After evaluating options, Sage Expense Management stood out for its ease of use and intuitiveness.

Easy Receipt Capture for Employees on the Move

Before Sage Expense Management, collecting and approving receipts required 2 full business days each month.

With Sage Expense Management’s intuitive mobile app, employees at Voodoo just snap a photo of their receipt, and the system’s intelligent OCR captures every detail automatically. It’s so simple that most employees prefer using the mobile app over any other method.

The finance team gets real-time visibility into spend, with every receipt securely stored and linked to the right card transaction.

This means zero paper trails, zero lost receipts, and zero friction.

Effortless Reconciliation

The correct mapping of expense data, automated reconciliation, and streamlined processing of expenses to QuickBooks have dramatically reduced the time the finance team spends on closing its books each month.

Policy Enforcement

With Sage Expense Management, employees can tag expenses to specific projects using a drop-down menu when filing expense reports.

The finance team can also set up custom expense policies, for example, the ability to mandate receipts above a certain amount.

Seamless Integration with QuickBooks Online

Once approved, expenses get auto-pushed to QuickBooks Online.

Outcome: A Stress-Free, Audit-Ready Finance Process

With Sage Expense Management, Voodoo Brewery has streamlined its expense management. Employees file their expenses faster, with fewer errors, and the finance team has access to real-time spend visibility and audit-ready data.