Time for Change: Modernising Travel and Expenses at Breitling
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Head of Customer Success, Yokoy
When 140-year-old Swiss watchmaker Breitling set out on a transformation project to future-proof the company it faced one key question — where to lean into its storied history, and where to modernise.
For its iconic designs, that meant a ‘retro modern’ update that carefully balanced heritage with the demands of today’s luxury fashion buyer.
But elsewhere in the business, it was all about modernisation.
For Breitling’s finance team, the transformation mandate meant it needed to completely re-think costly, manual, and error-prone processes that had been in place for too long.
Challenge: Limited data quality leads to slowing decision making
Breitling’s legacy travel and expense management had left its finance teams chasing their tails and making decisions on partial, and often outdated data.
Employees still collected paper receipts, tracked them in Excel spreadsheets, and waited weeks for validation and approval from individual managers.
It left their finance teams with incomplete data, stored in an ever-increasing number of spreadsheets across the company, and giving no real-time oversight into company spend.
To become a more agile, future-thinking finance team, Breitling needed to automate the entire travel and expense process and provide its teams with real-time, high-quality data.
Solution: End-to-end automation for travel and expenses
True to its rich tradition of innovation, Breitling chose a solution that would set them up for long-term success, by partnering with Yokoy.
“Yokoy meets all our requirements. As an extremely innovative solution for key corporate processes, it significantly transforms the role of accounting,” says Dr. Lars Kästle. “Yokoy does exactly what it should, and integrates seamlessly with all major standard solutions.”
By integrating Yokoy’s AI-powered Spend Management Platform with travel booking provider TravelPerk, the team at Breitling now has end-to-end automation of travel and expenses, alongside real-time, accurate data on company spend.
Company travel policies are stored in the TravelPerk booking tool, removing the need for approvals and additional cost controls when employees book a trip.
All the booking details, are automatically imported, validated, and processed according to company policies by Yokoy alongside employees’ expenses, making it a seamless process from end-to-end.
"We have a single source of truth with unmatched data quality for the audit trail. With Yokoy, we've found exactly the level of transparency we need for future-oriented business planning and forecasting."
Impact: Real-time, accurate data leads to better decision-making
By automating travel and expenses with Yokoy and TravelPerk, Breitling has:
- Increased compliance with company travel and spending policies
- Increased the accuracy of decision-making with higher quality, real-time spend data
- Saved hundreds of hours a year manually processing and approving travel and expenses
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