Retirement Villages provide independent living with support, amenities, and community to help people age well.
Retirement Villages needed a more efficient system to manage expenses across its widely distributed workforce. Barkers’ Digital team designed and implemented an automated solution for submitting, approving, and paying expenses—including company credit cards. This has significantly reduced administrative workload while improving oversight and compliance with company expense policies.
Retirement Villages operates nearly 20 integrated retirement communities across the UK, enabling older adults to live independently with support on site. Most employees are based within these communities, creating a distributed workforce.
Previously, expense management was largely manual, slow, and resource-intensive. Limited expense categories and weak tracking meant managers struggled to spot policy breaches, allowing many claims to slip through unchecked.
Barkers is a certified partner for Coupa, the total spend management platform, and so we were able to leverage this technology to transform the expenses process for Retirement Villages. Our award-winning Digital team — made up of procurement, commercial and technology practitioners — worked closely with Retirement Village’s in-house systems administrator to do this.
Together, we designed an automated, user-friendly process for submitting and approving expenses. This included company credit cards linked to Coupa user accounts, a mobile app for logging expenses on the go, and integration with the firm’s finance system. We built a more comprehensive list of expense categories, robust approval workflows, and features such as automatic alerts when claims contravened company policy, plus variable mileage tracking.
Knowledge exchange was also a key part of the project. Retirement Villages wanted to be self sufficient at managing the new expenses process as soon as possible. Therefore, our Solution Architects held weekly sessions with the in-house systems administrator to provide intense support through the design and production phases of the project, including help to develop training materials.
The new system has transformed how Retirement Villages manages expenses, delivering both efficiency and compliance across the organisation.
Key benefits include:
These improvements have led to:
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From Manual to Automated: Expense Management at Retirement Villages – Case Study