Groupize Pursues Total Meeting Cost with New Expense Functionality

Event management platform Groupize this week launched a new payment tracking and expense reconciliation function for users, which the company called a first step toward producing a view of total meeting cost, including participant travel and ancillary vendors.

On the payment side, the platform facilitates expense requests, review and approval processes and workflows for payment and credit card or virtual card requests. It also tracks credit card, virtual card, ACH or check payments, and offers a centralized repository for meeting-related invoices and hotel folios to achieve a consolidated view of expenses and their associated payment statuses.

The new functionality can incorporate meetings transactions from numerous sources, including its own platform for meeting space, food and beverage and guest rooms associated with a meeting along with travel bookings made by meeting participants. In a follow up email to BTN, the company said it will manually import data from agencies and for off-channel bookings there is a mechanism for attendees to input their air travel details. Aggregating off-channel bookings, however, is in the company’s roadmap.

For users of SAP Concur Travel, for which Groupize since last year has provided the technology spine for the larger company’s event management product, the functionality is further optimized. Groupize will import participants’ air and car spend automatically from the Concur booking platform and combine that with the room block consumption as well as fixed costs for meeting space and food and beverage to create a consolidated view of the total cost. Chief commercial officer Charles de Gaspe Beaubien said the company would pursue closer integrations with other payment and expense providers but told BTN that no specific companies were in the pipeline now as the company over the next eight months will focus more on the payment element.

“The last mile in a meetings program is the auto-reconciliation,” added de Gaspe Beaubien. “We are committed to our vision, and continued investment into creating a transformative end-to-end Fintech platform for all events, from small to large. The platform roadmap includes additional expense system integrations, payment card providers, and automated folio and reimbursement processes.”

De Gaspe Beaubien told BTN Groupize’s most successful customers mandate the payment solution, so innovation in that area will be a priority.

According to Groupize, the functionality was created at the behest of a large client with hundreds of annual meetings that was struggling with virtual card reconciliation and manual integration of meetings-associated spending. The client still was working with spreadsheets to understand and manage the holistic spend. To that end, the new functionality offers a number of reports utilizing the new aggregated spend data, including hotel room utilization and audit; cancellation, attrition and commission tracking, attendee type and health care provider tracking and transfer of value reports, among others.

Groupize introduced the new capabilities on Monday at the Global Business Travel Association convention in San Diego.