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Cater Care is one of Australia's largest contract catering, accommodation and facilities management providers, 100% Australian-owned, with more than 3,000 people serving over 200 sites nationwide. Its operations span five divisions and reach into some of the most logistically complex corners of the country: remote mining, oil and gas camps, aged care, healthcare, education and retail.
That scale is exactly what made managing everyday spend so hard. With sites and people spread across every state and territory, Cater Care was running a decentralised operation where hundreds of locations needed to buy things, and head-office travellers needed to pay for hotels, taxis, meals and client entertainment, with almost no central visibility over any of it.
We sat down with Gary Peacock, Chief Operating Officer – Procurement at Cater Care, to hear how that's changed in the year since Cater Care moved to Weel.
Before Weel, Cater Care effectively ran two highly manual systems in parallel.
For corporate travellers, there was a fragmented process, and no corporate card. "Essentially, everyone just used their own money for their own expenses," Gary explained. People hoarded receipts, scanned them into a monthly spreadsheet, and sent it up the chain. A manager reviewed it, forwarded it to accounts payable, and reimbursements were paid out weekly, but only if you made the cut-off. "You had to get it in by Wednesday to get it paid out on a Friday."
Out in the field, sites relied on two equally dated methods: the traditional petty cash tin, and prepaid post-office cards that had to be manually topped up every time an invoice came in. Both meant someone was "forever chasing people for invoices."
The real problem wasn't just the admin. Lack of central visibility. Expense data was siloed. Everything sat in inboxes and individual reconciliation files, with no central repository.
"If I ask for an understanding of how much we're spending on fuel or on local supplies, it takes someone in accounts a week and a half to figure it out, across seven sites. I've got all these costs, and I just don't understand it."
That frustration, voiced by one of Cater Care's senior operators, was the tipping point.
The search began almost by accident. When the operator described what he needed, Gary recognised it instantly as a procurement card. A quick Google search surfaced Weel, and after a single demo the fit was obvious.
"Basically, this will solve all our problems. Everything's in one place, it's transparent, we can see what's incomplete, we can create our own categorisations, the reconciliation's really easy."
Cater Care rolled Weel out to around 200 people across four accounts, one for corporate, and three for its core operating entities. Despite early nerves about the management overhead, the reality proved the opposite. "We've since proven that the time-consuming administration of it is actually easier than the reconciliation, or the mismanagement of it, afterwards."
Issuing cards is fast, training is light, and the team backs it with a documented policy and workflows shared in advance. And when someone leaves, "we can cancel those cards in a heartbeat and reissue to replacements."
The biggest shift has been moving from month-end hindsight to real-time oversight. Senior operators no longer wait six weeks for a reconciliation to find out what's been spent.
"It's not at the end of the month you figure out what someone has spent, in real time you see what they've spent. From an operations perspective, it's significantly added value."
That visibility has driven real operational decisions. As a food company buying in bulk from approved suppliers, Cater Care can now see when sites are making ad-hoc purchases and ask why. And in its remote division, the team quickly got a handle on vehicle fuel usage, the prices being paid and the volumes being consumed, prompting questions that simply couldn't have been asked before.
Card control has also paid off in a way the old system never could. Just last week, one person's card was used fraudulently. Cater Care shut it down and reissued it within a very short window, a stark contrast to the prepaid cards of the past.
"If one of those post-office cards had been hacked before, it would have taken much longer to detect. It then could have taken us days to rebuy a new one and resend it to site."
Perhaps the clearest sign of success is who's championing it. The benefit has landed across every level of the business, but the loudest fans are the people doing the spending.
"End users are ecstatic about it. You get your receipt, take a photo of it, and move on. It just simplifies the whole system for them."
That matters more than it sounds. Under the old process, some team members went three or four months without submitting expenses simply because it was too hard and no one chased them. Now the friction is gone: a photo at the point of purchase replaces an hour of receipt-wrangling each month. Approvers and budget owners get full transparency, and accounts payable no longer has to manually reimburse individuals at all.
A year in, Gary's verdict is straightforward.
"For us, it's fit for purpose. It's solved all the things we were looking for. We're pretty pleased with Weel."
This transformational change is one part of a broader digital transformation at Cater Care, designed to improve workflows and improve business efficiency.
If your team is managing spend across multiple sites with no central view, book a demo to see how Weel works, or take the product tour at your own pace.
