Lumira builds developer tooling. Three hundred and ten people, six of them in finance, and nine engineering teams with genuine autonomy over what they buy.
The situation
The autonomy was deliberate and worked well. What did not work was that nobody could see the total. Software was bought on personal cards and expensed, on a handful of virtual cards issued ad hoc, and occasionally by invoice, and the three never met until the year-end audit.
- Personal cards, reimbursed monthly, with the vendor name buried in a free-text field.
- A virtual-card add-on used by two teams and forgotten by the rest.
- A subscription tracker in a wiki page, last edited fourteen months earlier.
Nobody was doing anything wrong. Each team had bought the tool it needed at the moment it needed it, and each purchase was individually defensible. It was only in aggregate that four vendors turned out to be sitting on the books between three and nine times.
The change
Cards went out to every team with the category already on them, and the personal-card route was closed the same week. Three weeks, and the only genuinely contentious part was the second one, when the teams that had been buying on personal cards had to stop.
The finding came almost immediately. Once spend grouped by merchant instead of by claimant, the duplicates were not an investigation — they were the top of the list, sorted descending.
Nobody had made a mistake. That was the uncomfortable bit — every one of those nine purchases was the right call on the day.
Marta Solis · VP Finance, Lumira
The outcome
Forty-one subscriptions were cancelled in the first quarter, worth about a hundred and eighty thousand euros annualised. Roughly two-thirds were straight duplicates and the rest were seats nobody had used in over a year.
The teams kept their autonomy. What changed is that a purchase now shows up on a shared list the week it happens, rather than at the audit, so the second team to buy something already knows the first one did.
