How Volopay helped Storefriendly

Storefriendly is a service that offers secure and affordable storage spaces, including self-storage units across Singapore. Their facilities create flexible storage options for their clients, making it easier to carry out self-storage. Their facilities are air-conditioned and have a clean environment to maintain the integrity and quality of the stored items. Additionally, there is 24/7 CCTV surveillance to keep the items and lockers safe. The storage spaces are available for personal as well as business use.

The company was launched in 2002 in Hong Kong. At the time, they boasted 750,000 square feet of space and 20,000 customers in Hong Kong, Kowloon, New Territories, and Macau. The company came to Singapore in 2011, expanding to Taiwan in 2012 and Shanghai in 2013. This expansion earned them the title of the Largest Self-Storage Group in Asia. It was a title that underscored their high service standards, technological adoptions, and high value for money. 

More recently, in 2019, they relaunched in Singapore with new locations, including a flagship location including robotic space-saving solutions (Storefriendly GO). This is the first time a self-storage operator in Singapore is offering such technology.

Storefriendly’s Finance executive Mr.Edmund Lim shared with us a bunch of problems the company was facing before they adopted Volopay. Before Volopay, Storefriendly handled its finances using a banking app. These applications can turn out to be extremely unresponsive when loaded with expense or transactional information. Additionally, they create extra work for the accounting team as they have to retrieve data from the app and then complete the books, which can be an extremely difficult task. The lack of an accounting integration and expense management system made their financial management a burdensome task. This also entails no visibility into company spending and transactions. 

Another problem the company was struggling with was corporate cards. Storefriendly needed virtual cards and affordable corporate cards, without which tracking of employee spending and the how, when, and where of the expenses made through the company funds was a major time-consuming task. Furthermore, the lack of a budget enforcement and management system added to their difficulty. The whole financial organization and bookkeeping process became extensively labor-intensive. Moreover, the company’s problems included very high remittance charges, making their international transactions even more expensive. This drained their company funds even further. 

Volopay proved to be an effective solution to all of Storefriendly’s challenges and problems. Storefriendly easily shifted from the banking app system to Volopay’s advanced and contemporary financial management system. The issue of ambiguous visibility into the company spending was easily solved by the feature of virtual cards and corporate cards directly integrated with an accounting system and the real-time transaction recording facility. This gave their employees access to the company funds however the manager had a clear view of all the expenses being made by the employees. Furthermore, with the direct accounting integration feature, the finance team was able to easily reconcile and complete audits of the company funds and expenses. 

Moreover, the “Departments” feature gave Storefriendly the ability to set every card with a specific monthly budget limit, which in turn did not create any discrepancies or disturbance in the company account books. This also helped the finance team save a lot of time and effort, which was generally invested in looking at all employee expenses, receipt matching, and approvals. With Volopay, all the expenses became company policy compliant and within the budget limits. Along with this, one of the most important reliefs Volopay brought along was low remittance fees. As there is no hidden or extra cost applied to international transfers, their transfers now are cheaper and save a huge amount of money.

Storefriendly extensively benefits from Volopay’s various features like direct accounting integration, easy corporate card accessibility and creation, low remittance fees, and a budget management facility.

From a heavy and unresponsive banking app for financial management, Storefriendly shifted to the modern all-in-one expense management system Volopay. All the high-end technological features offered by Volopay helped the company save a lot of money and time. It also helped its employees get better access to the company funds; however, the right monitoring of the manager. The financial team also reaped the benefits of direct accounting integration. Along with this, the company also saved the company a lot of money in international transfers.