How One Company Made Reporting Expenses Less of a Hassle Learn how this growing haircare company tamed an unruly issue.

Oribe makes high-end hair and beauty products, but its system to handle employee expenses was the equivalent of a comb-over in a windstorm -- a tangled mess. Sid Katari, CFO of the New York-based company, saw piles of forms and receipts, and employees frustrated by 30-day reimbursement times, and he got nervous. The company was growing fast -- in the past five years, workforce shot up from 50 to 200 and revenue grew annually by an average of 46 percent -- and "in a year or two," he says, "our expense system was going to break."

The fix

Before anything went bust, Katari discovered Concur Expense. "It has all these different modules that other providers don't offer, that we could add to meet our needs," he says. Concur is a cloud-based open platform that easily works with older systems, giving it the ability to, say, capture business credit card charges and then automatically process them into a report. (Or an employee can use its app to scan a receipt; the system does the rest). It also analyzes employees' spending, so employers can look for savings.