Ostrom runs a marketplace for reclaimed building materials. Six hundred and ten people, fourteen of them in finance, and about four hundred of them holding a company card.
The situation
Receipt capture sat at sixty-one per cent, and the missing thirty-nine were not evenly spread. They were concentrated in the people who travelled, which is to say the people whose spend mattered most and who were hardest to reach.
- A receipts inbox that nobody owned, holding eight months of unmatched photographs.
- An expense tool that could tell you a receipt was missing but not who to ask.
- A monthly chase spreadsheet, rebuilt by hand, sent as a reminder nobody read twice.
The cost was not the receipts. It was that a VAT reclaim needs the document, so every missing one was money the business had already spent and could not get back. Finance had put a number on it once and stopped, because the number was uncomfortable and nothing about the process could move it.
The change
Ostrom moved the ask. Instead of reconciling at month-end and chasing what was missing, the card prompts for the receipt at the moment it is tapped — merchant, amount and date already filled in, so the person only has to photograph the paper in their hand.
The rollout was four weeks and deliberately unglamorous: cards first for the travelling teams, everyone else a fortnight later. Nothing was migrated. The old inbox was left to drain and then switched off.
We had spent four years making the chase more efficient. It turns out the chase was the problem.
Bram de Vries · Head of Finance, Ostrom
The outcome
Capture reached ninety-four per cent in the first full quarter, and the last six points are genuinely the hard ones — lost paper, cash tips, a taxi in a country that does not issue them.
The chase itself went from around nineteen hundred emails a month to forty. That is the figure the team actually notices, because it is the one that used to occupy the last week of every month. The close moved from day twelve to day five as a side effect of the same change.
Bram describes the first quiet month-end as unsettling. Nothing was waiting for him.
