| Industry: | Not-for-profit - animal welfare |
| Company size: | 35+ care and retail sites statewide with 170+ ProSpend users |
| Location: | Queensland, Australia |
| Solutions: | Expense Management, AP Automation, Virtual Cards (Wise) |
| ERP: | Pronto Xi 780 |
Summary
RSPCA Queensland is the state’s leading animal welfare charity, dedicated to improving the lives of animals. Its work spans animal rescue, care and adoption, veterinary treatment, wildlife rehabilitation, animal welfare investigations and advocacy. Before ProSpend, card reconciliations relied on spreadsheets and email, while invoices approved in a separate tool had to be manually re-entered into Pronto. Chasing receipts and checking coding across multiple locations took days each month. With ProSpend expense management, AP automation and Wise virtual cards feeding Pronto Xi, coded and approved business spend now flows directly into the finance system. This has removed three to four hours of manual data entry a day, improved month-end records and enabled finance to get funds to a regional shelter in minutes.
RSPCA Queensland is a charity that exists for animals to live better lives. It protects animals from cruelty and neglect, rescues and rehabilitates animals in need, and helps pets find loving homes. Alongside this work, it supports people to care for their animals through education and community services, and advocates for improvements in animal welfare practices and laws.
Its operations include animal care centres, domestic animal and wildlife hospitals, a wildlife rehabilitation centre, rescue and Inspectorate services, op shops and retail services. A finance team of seven, based in Brisbane, supports the organisation’s operations.
Geography and volume made manual finance processes hard to sustain. With cardholders and claimants spread across the state and a lean central team, every manual step added time and risk.
Card reconciliation was the first pain point. Cardholders took receipts and emailed them in; finance then downloaded an Excel spreadsheet and sent it back to cardholders to code, which meant constantly chasing missing receipts. For Marianne Grieve (Finance Systems and Operations Lead), reconciling the corporate cards alone took roughly 4 days to reconcile each month.
Accounts payable was another struggle. Invoices were approved in an older, half-automated tool that didn't talk to Pronto, so approved invoices still had to be keyed in by hand, taking at least three to four hours a day of data entry, with one team member effectively tied to the task.
Manual work also made consistency difficult. Coding varied, errors crept in, and asking a shelter in Cairns to fill out a paper form was a genuine hassle. A change in finance leadership who wanted a proper repeatable process was the trigger to modernise.
“The biggest pain points were time and the risk of error. When everything's manual you're always introducing risk, and you can't get uniformity across the board.” - Marianne Grieve, Finance Systems and Operations Lead
RSPCA Queensland chose ProSpend to put cards, expenses and AP on one system that talks to Pronto; a priority when many of the people using it are non-finance staff at shelters and shops. The combination of card reconciliation and AP in a single, easy-to-use platform, with a Wise virtual cards option to grow into, set ProSpend apart from the other tools evaluated.
Expenses and card reconciliation: staff capture receipts in the ProSpend app the moment they spend, automatic reminders chase submissions, and coding defaults route spend to the right accounts. Our finance team is no longer chasing paperwork across the state.
AP automation: supplier invoices arrive in one place instead of finance chasing each entity, are coded and approved through amount-based workflows, then export to Pronto with no re-keying.
Wise virtual cards: finance can issue a virtual card in minutes, set start and end dates with daily limits, and freeze a card instantly.
Pronto Xi integration: a straight import moves approved data across cleanly, so records land where they should.
“What surprised me most was how easily I can teach people to use it, and how quickly they picked it up, especially non-finance people.” - Marianne Grieve, Finance Systems and Operations Lead
The virtual cards quickly became a favourite. Adopted a couple of months after go-live, they gave finance a fast, controllable way to get money to the regions. When a shelter manager in Bundaberg needed funds late on a Friday afternoon to buy feed for the animals and her physical card was maxed out, Marianne issued a Wise virtual card that same afternoon and had it up and running before the weekend.
“In our industry you never know what's going to happen, so getting funds to a regional shelter almost instantly, and being able to cut it off just as fast, is exactly what we need. We're now using them for staff travel too.” - Marianne Grieve, Finance Systems and Operations Lead
For RSPCA QLD the gains are in time and accuracy rather than headline dollar savings and for a lean, statewide finance team, that time is the point.
✓ Three to four hours a day of manual invoice keying into Pronto, eliminated.
✓ Cards, expenses and AP consolidated onto one system, replacing spreadsheets, email approvals and a disconnected AP tool.
✓ Cleaner month-end: more spend booked to the correct month, so accruals and journal corrections are down.
✓ Same-day virtual cards to regional sites, then switched off just as fast.
✓ One consistent process from Brisbane to the regions, on a system non-finance staff pick up quickly.
“Our month-end became far more correct and accurate. More expenses land in the right month, so our accruals are a lot less. It just flows.” - Marianne Grieve, Finance Systems and Operations Lead
Support and the Professional Services team have reinforced the decision. When RSPCA Queensland needed invoice reading to be more precise for their documents, the ProSpend team looked past the immediate fix.
“They listen to what the customer wants. When we needed the invoice reading to be more precise, they didn't just fix the one thing, they went after the root of the problem and brought us into testing to help teach the system to read for itself." - Marianne Grieve, Finance Systems and Operations Lead
RSPCA Queensland set out to replace manual, error-prone finance processes across a spread-out network without adding headcount. With ProSpend expense management, AP automation and Wise virtual cards feeding into Pronto Xi, the team removed hours of daily data entry, tidied up month-end and gave regional sites a fast, controlled way to spend, all on one system that's easy to run from Brisbane and easy for non-finance staff to use.
“Definitely take on ProSpend and work smarter, not harder. Especially if you've got people all over the place, it's the same system whether you're in Brisbane or Townsville.” - Marianne Grieve, Finance Systems and Operations Lead