Background
Purpose Accounting is a boutique accounting and CFO advisory firm that works exclusively with not-for-profits and charities. The Sydney CPA practice acts as an extended finance team for for-purpose organisations right across Australia, handling everything from bookkeeping and payroll to reporting, audits and finance technology projects. It has delivered more than 200 finance and tech transformation projects and oversees more than $255 million in client budgets.
When a firm's job is to recommend the systems its clients run on, the systems it uses itself come under a particular kind of scrutiny. Ricardo Medeiros, Senior Finance Associate at Purpose, sits right at that intersection. He manages client finance functions day to day, and he has lived with Purpose's own accounts payable process from the inside.
The challenge: three platforms for every invoice
Before Weel, an invoice at Purpose took the long way to get paid. Staff sent supplier invoices to a third-party OCR tool, which extracted the data. From there the invoices moved into Xero. From Xero, the finance team built a payment batch, uploaded it to the bank and waited for approval inside the banking portal.
"There were many different steps. Getting the data from this external software for the extraction, then from there to Xero, Xero to the bank. So just going to three different places." - Ricardo Medeiros, Senior Finance Associate, Purpose Accounting
Payables ran on a fixed processing day. That kept the workload predictable but made anything outside the cycle awkward. An urgent invoice meant repeating the multi-platform routine for a single payment.
Purpose's clients were dealing with versions of the same problem, often with more manual steps layered on top. At one client, every invoice went to a third-party provider, where finance staff had to log in, review each one and publish it to Xero by hand. They then created a batch payment in Xero, downloaded every individual invoice as a PDF, uploaded the batch to the bank, and sent the bank signatories a copy of every invoice along with a batch summary before anything was paid.
Two more problems sat underneath the process. Approvals often happened over email, with invoices forwarded back and forth and sign-off buried in inbox threads, which Ricardo describes as "a really weak form of audit trail." And because approvals lived inside the bank, a change in personnel became a project of its own. Getting a new approver set up with the bank, Ricardo says, "takes time and it's really hard as well. It's not that simple."
Proving it in-house first
Purpose already used Weel virtual cards across the firm, so moving accounts payable onto the same platform was a natural next step. The new process is short to describe. Invoices go to Weel. Approval policies route each one to the right person automatically. Payments go out from Weel, and the data flows straight into Xero, ready to reconcile.
Staff already knew Weel from their cards, so the rollout barely registered.
"Once the approval policies are all set up, it flows automatically. So from the end user's perspective, it's really easy. They simply send an invoice, and from there it gets paid. It was very intuitive and everyone embraced it really fast." - Ricardo Medeiros
The fixed processing day stopped being a constraint. Scheduling payments became simpler, and when an invoice landed outside the cycle, it was approved and paid quickly instead of waiting for the next run.
Taking it to clients
With the process proven at home, Purpose started recommending Weel accounts payable to its clients. Since 2022, Purpose has brought 14 not-for-profit clients onto Weel, and three of them now run accounts payable through Weel alongside their cards.
For one client, Purpose built AP on Weel from day one. The brief was the most linear workflow possible, one that would cut the time Purpose's own team spends handling and processing invoices. That client set up its own approval flow, uploads and approves invoices internally, and sets a payment date for each one.
Another client is moving across from the manual, multi-step process described above. The goal there is the same: less bookkeeping time, and a lower accounting bill for the client as a result.
Purpose treats every client rollout as a proper change programme. For its first client on Weel AP, the team ran a workshop with the whole organisation to formally launch the new process and answer questions. It then shared Weel's help resources, PDF guides and videos so staff had material to refer back to, with the videos proving the favourite.
The support material turned out to be a safety net. Nobody has asked to go back.
"It was very straightforward. I didn't see anyone getting stuck. They set up the mobile app and the web as well, and it's very intuitive for end users." - Ricardo Medeiros
The results: no longer the bottleneck
The biggest shift, in Ricardo's view, is independence. Purpose processes bookkeeping for its clients fortnightly. Under the old process, an urgent invoice that arrived the day after a bookkeeping run could wait up to two weeks. Now the client uploads the invoice to Weel, the approval is triggered automatically, and it is paid as soon as it is approved.
"The approver approves and the invoice is paid without any delays, or impacting any projects or any travel or any commitments." - Ricardo Medeiros
For the client moving off the old process, an invoice that once passed through seven manual handoffs across three platforms now takes two: submit it in Weel, then approve it. Payment and the Xero sync follow on their own. That is a 70% reduction in invoice touchpoints.
"It's the client being able to be more independent with the whole workflow, instead of us being the bottleneck in the process." - Ricardo Medeiros
Project staff at client organisations now submit invoices directly in the Weel app, add a description, apply the accounting codes and send them for approval. By the time an invoice reaches Purpose, the context is already attached.
Changing approvers no longer involves the bank at all. When someone new needs sign-off rights, Purpose adds them as a user in Weel and they are ready to go, with zero bank visits or paperwork.
"With Weel, we can quickly set up another user without having to go to the bank. This process was a lot smoother." - Ricardo Medeiros
Reimbursements improved too. Staff who spend out of pocket are paid back quickly, with far fewer emails. And the email chains Ricardo once called a weak audit trail are gone: 100% of invoice approvals now sit on a digital audit trail in Weel.
Purpose is already looking at what comes next. The team is exploring batch payments for clients who approve invoices one by one, and another client is preparing to move its accounts payable onto Weel, starting with a training session led by Purpose.
The before and after is stark. Purpose's finance team has gone from three platforms and a fixed payment day to one system that runs on its own. Its clients have gone from seven manual handoffs per invoice to two, from waiting up to a fortnight on urgent payments to paying on demand, and from bank paperwork every time an approver changes to zero. For a firm that recommends systems for a living, the sequence is the real endorsement: Purpose tried Weel accounts payable on itself first, then put its name behind it with the organisations it serves.
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