Case study: Higgins Coatings Introduces Archa Corporate Credit Cards to Extend the Value of SAP Concur Solutions

Higgins adds Velocity points scheme and increased visibility into credit card limits

Since 1949, Higgins Coatings has been Australia’s go-to provider for commercial painting and maintenance needs across a broad range of industries. An Australian family-owned company, Higgins offers affordable painting solutions, tailored to customer’s requirements, no matter what the size or nature of the project. Higgins is committed to providing a safe environment for their employees and the community and delivering projects to the highest quality standards.

Why Higgins Coatings choose SAP Concur?

• Improved staff productivity and greater efficiencies across the business
• Greater visibility into credit card limits and the ability to change limits
• Introduction of Archa’s Velocity point scheme
• Near real-time integration between Concur Expense and Archa corporate credit cards
• Archa’s ease of application and speed of set up

"Archa has introduced efficiencies across the whole business. We’re always looking for ways to improve staff productivity and the Sap Concur and Archa’s solutions have contributed to doing that which has been great." - James Iliomanis, Chief Financial Officer at Higgins Coatings

Higgins Coatings case study

Discover how Higgins introduced efficiencies and improved staff productivity with automated expense management and Archa business credit cards.

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Moving Away from a Manual, Paper-Based System to Concur Expense

Prior to implementing Concur Expense, Higgins’ expense management process was manual and paper-based, with employee submissions and the finance team’s administration overly time-consuming. James Iliomanis, Chief Financial Officer at Higgins Coatings explained, “Our need for an expense management system was driven by the fact that we had a paper-based system at that point in time. Employees were filling out Excel spreadsheets, printing them off and stapling a whole bunch of receipts to the back, which would then be manually signed off and then forwarded to the finance team to check and process. It was a manual process that required a lot of double checking.”

For Higgins, selecting Concur Expense as their new expense management solution was an easy decision. The finance team could see the benefits investing in a new system would bring to the business and Higgins viewed Concur Expense as a cost-effective selection.

“The CFO at the time was keen to move to a more sophisticated system and prior to joining Higgins I was working for a company that had been a long-time user of Concur Expense. We also knew that Concur Expense was best-in-breed, so it was a pretty easy sell,” said James. “Concur Expense wasn’t very cost prohibitive. In terms of impacting the bottom line, it wasn’t going to be a massive imposition on the business. We could see the improved efficiencies Concur Expense would bring were going to override any additional costs.”

Higgins has been a Concur Expense customer for over a decade. In that time, the relationship with SAP Concur has developed into a trusted partnership. “The thing we really like about SAP Concur is how Concur gets on the front foot and is very solutions focused, which is excellent,” said James.

Finding Efficiencies with Archa’s Corporate Credit Cards: Velocity Points Scheme and Card Limit Visibility

In 2024, Higgins became aware of SAP Concur’s new partnership with Archa Corporate Credit Cards. Higgins had an existing credit card feed into Concur Expense, however, the finance team could see numerous benefits switching out their incumbent credit card provider for Archa, including the addition of a points scheme. “Prior to Archa our corporate credit cards were with one of the big banks and we had a live feed into Concur, but the credit cards didn’t have a point scheme, which was going to be valuable to us,” said James.

Additionally, Higgins’ previous corporate card provider couldn’t provide staff with visibility of their spend against their credit card limit. For Higgins, this improvement would be an important addition to the new process. According to James, this was going to be one of the biggest benefits to their employees. “Before Archa, we would have to send staff updates telling them where they were at from a transactional point of view. For example, if they had some big expenses coming in, they weren’t sure where they were at with their card limit. They were running blind. With Archa, we can see it all and we can also change card limits, rather than put more money on the card, which is what we used to have to do. It’s just a lot easier. The guys have a lot more visibility on their spending and on a real-time basis too. It makes life easier for everybody. And the feedback has been really good.”

Once the finance team at Higgins had made the decisions to move their corporate card program to Archa, they were pleasantly surprised by the ease of administrative set up and speed at which their employees embraced the roll out.

“Setting up Archa was a lot easier than what I thought it would be, and we probably could have gone live quicker than what we did but once we picked up the project again this year (2025) it was really easy,” said James. “Internally, it was just a case of getting our staff to activate their cards and linking into existing profiles and that was a very quick process. Archa had given us materials to help enable employees on the new cards and the new process and we ran an internal session for employees ourselves. It was a good opportunity to give everyone a refresh on what they should be doing.”

The efficiency gains following the roll out were self-evident across the company. “We were able to introduce Archa to employees as an efficiency improvement,” explained James. “We said to everyone, ‘You’ve got your live feed coming in, so you’ll have a complete set of expenses every month, so it’s a lot easier to reconcile your monthly statement because you know you’re going to have a complete set of data in there.’ They know on a real-time basis where they were at and our people can spend more time on their day-to-day roles, and less time managing admin.”

Verifying Expense Claims with SAP Concur’s Auditing Service Concur Audit

One of the key selling points of Concur Expense for Higgins, was Concur Audit, an auditing service that works in sync with Concur Expense to verify expense claims and receipts for customers, to not only take the pressure off their business, but also save them time and help with policy compliance.

“The Concur auditing team do the clerical checking for us, they make sure that there’s clerical accuracy between what is on the actual receipt and what is put on the form, which is a massive timesaver for us,” said James.

Higgin’s impressive growth over the past decade has placed an increased importance on the allocation and re-allocation of team resources. The introduction of Concur Audit meant that some of the more mundane, manual tasks could be removed from the team’s remit.

“It would have been very expensive to have had my finance team check every single claim that has come in,” explained James. “The business has grown quite a lot and the volume of claims as increased significantly. The Concur auditing service has meant our finance team could spend their time doing things that add more value to the business.”

Streamlining Higgin’s Accrual Reporting with Consultative Intelligence

The Higgins finance team were looking to increase their visibility into month-end accruals, and while they knew the data would be sitting in Concur, they were looking for assistance in customising a report that would suit their bespoke needs.

James explained, “At the end of the month, we wanted to accrue and see anything that hadn’t been submitted. We were going into individual claims and checking and trying to accrue on that basis. It was a time-consuming process. We wanted to generate a report that could dump everything out of a claim into a format that works for us, so that we can just do a simple journal posting at the end of the month, rather than having to spend all this time checking our employee’s claims to work out what’s accruing or outstanding.”

Higgins decided to leverage Concur’s bespoke reporting service, Consultative Intelligence, for customers using Business Intelligence for advanced reporting. Consultative Intelligence is a reporting service that helps customers to maximise unique business spend data insights using custom reporting and analysis. A Concur reporting expert works with the customer to create reports that provide the right information, in the right format.

“We engaged with Concur’s Consultative Intelligence service to help build an accrual report for us. We knew the data was there and we had a format we wanted the report to be in. The reporting experts at Concur’s Consultative Intelligence service were able to build the report for us. Our finance team saved a lot of time by getting the experts to do it for us and we got exactly what we needed,” said James.

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