Washmen

About

Launched in 2015, Washmen is a digital laundry and dry cleaning service based in the UAE. After growing parabolically over the last 8 years, the company has become a household name around the country. Washmen launched its 30,000 sq ft facility in a bid to build the best operations the laundry industry has seen, and ever since then, there has been no looking back.

Digital technology is an integral part of the company, and as a highly efficient enterprise, the finance team at Washmen has always strived to invest its time and resources into building the best possible experience for all its services. As such, Washmen already had a great finance team; but they still faced common spend management challenges and wanted to improve their finance tech stack.

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Problem

A highly manual, decentralized reimbursement process

Before Alaan, Washmen used a bookkeeping system that involved manually recording, maintaining, classifying, and summarising business transactions and internet/card banking payments. The finance team was always chasing receipts and found it difficult to control their spending in real-time.

The process followed previously was inefficient and meant a lot of involvement (and manual admin) by the management to deal with all these payments. There was limited visibility on expenses, and often the finance team had to chase employees to ask for information about payments or request additional documentation, like invoices or receipts.

Furthermore, having multiple petty cash payments done by drivers running their huge delivery fleet, the team wanted to leverage a tool to help automate these manual tasks. Washmen required a centralized solution for all their spending and wanted a platform to unify all their payments in one place. Once the management team at Washmen heard of Alaan, they dived deeper into the solution, attended a demo, and liked the product.

Solution

An all-in-one spend management system with seamless onboarding

‍Washmen signed up with Alaan, bringing all their spending under one unified platform. Now, all expenses revolving around SaaS, office equipment, and petty cash(to name a few) are undertaken using the Alaan platform - the finance department at Washman doesn't have to chase after employees to understand their expenses or obtain their invoices and receipts.

Washmen employees can spend as they need for work without breaking policy. They're happy knowing the company's expense policy is built into the tool via spend limits and approval workflows.

Meanwhile, the finance team can maintain a good level of visibility, and control over spend, by setting limits on the cards, building workflows, and creating custom fields to categorize spend

Since switching to Alaan, Washmen has had more transparency on its spending, and as the software is easy to use, they don't need much support from our Customer Success team. These two benefits mean that the team can go ahead and make payments as required, while finance can maintain a close eye on spending and make suggestions to optimize budgets and more.
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Like the sound of Washmen’s story? Learn how getting spend visibility and finance automation could save time and money at your business; schedule a demo now!