How SRJ Walker Wayland eliminated card risk and scaled spend management across a growing client portfolio with Weel

The challenge: shared cards, security risk, and no real controls

SRJ Walker Wayland is a Brisbane-based accounting and advisory firm offering services across business advisory, CFO solutions, audit, and tax. Tracy Johnson leads the firm’s CFO & Financial Solutions division, managing a team that handles bookkeeping, payroll, and outsourced CFO work for clients across a wide range of industries.

Tracy was dealing with a problem he kept seeing everywhere: businesses handing out Visa debit cards linked directly to their bank accounts with almost no oversight. He’d seen it at SRJ first. The firm had debit cards issued to staff for admin purchases and then one night, they were breached. Thirty thousand dollars in fraudulent transactions hit the account overnight.

‍“I went through that process which identified these things it looked very bogus but it took us like six to eight weeks for me to get that money back from St. George. I found that process really onerous.”
Tracy Johnson, Partner, CFO & Financial Solutions, SRJ Walker Wayland

The breach was the turning point. Tracy cut up the debit cards. But he also started looking at the broader problem: the same risk was sitting in his client base too. Small business owners handing physical debit cards to staff, no way to track who spent what, and no ability to react quickly if something went wrong.

The stakes were real. A debit card linked to a live business account means a breach doesn’t just create admin headaches. It can threaten the fundamentals of running the business.‍

“If your account’s breached and you’re trying to recover your money, it could be a large breach, which means you can’t make payroll this week.”
Tracy Johnson

What Tracy needed

A solution that could work across SRJ internally and be deployed to clients at scale. The requirements were clear: “I’ve always looked for ways of reducing and mitigating risk for our clients internally and for their businesses too.” - Tracy Johnson

Why Tracy chose Weel

Weel stood out because it solved the security problem first and everything else followed from there.

Unlike a bank-issued card linked to a live account, Weel works on a prepaid model. If a card is compromised, Tracy can turn it off immediately and issue a replacement in minutes. In four years, he’s only seen one or two breaches and the resolution each time was measured in minutes, not weeks.

‍“You can actually turn that digital card off immediately and put in a claim through Weel, then just issue another digital card to that individual in five minutes and keep moving forward.” - Tracy Johnson

The speed of card management alone changed how Tracy thought about spend controls for clients. When a manager leaves, the card is gone before they walk out the door. When a new site opens, cards are live the same day.

Rolling Weel out across clients

Tracy’s CFO team now deploys Weel for clients across multiple industries, from tourism and hospitality to clubs, professional services, and multi-site operations.

One of his larger implementations is the Soak Bathhouse group with six separate trading entities and sites across Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. When site managers need to make ad hoc purchases (groceries, supplies, everyday running costs), Weel gives each manager their own virtual card with a defined spend limit, rather than passing around a single physical card.‍

“I convinced the business owner that this was better than issuing out physical credit cards. You could have a manager that starts and then after six months they leave. Digital cards mean you can get them up and running within the hour and limit their spend as well.” - Tracy Johnson

For travel-heavy clients like Tourism Moreton Bay, who took a team to New Zealand, Weel gives Tracy’s team the flexibility to top up card limits on the fly, either by fast transfer or adjusting auto top-up amounts, without needing to go near a bank.

The same budget-first approach works for project spend too. For club clients running seasonal events (an Easter or ANZAC Day campaign, for example), Tracy assigns a card to the project team with a fixed spend cap. The team stays within the budget. The project closes clean.

Xero integration and coding accuracy

One of the things Tracy’s team relies on most is how Weel maps to Xero and how it reduces the reconciliation burden for his bookkeepers.

Weel imports the chart of accounts directly from Xero, and on a per-budget basis Tracy can restrict which expense categories staff see when submitting receipts. Instead of scrolling through every account code, employees only see the ones relevant to their role or project.‍

“You can modify Weel to customise the chart of accounts that you want users to utilise and integrate that to your chart of accounts in Xero.” - Tracy Johnson

The same logic applies to tracking categories. For clients who need spend tracked at a project, cost centre, or client level, Tracy configures Weel to surface only the relevant categories, which means cleaner data from the point of spend, less rework at month-end, and a bookkeeping team that spends less time correcting coding errors.

Receipts are captured in the Weel app at the time of purchase, digitised automatically, and synced to Xero. The monthly receipt chase (missing transactions, follow-up emails, the fallback to a cash account) is largely gone.

Visibility is another area where bank-issued cards consistently fall short. When multiple cards sit under a single bank facility, all transactions feed into one line in Xero, leaving bookkeepers to manually split spend and chase individuals for receipts after the fact. With Weel, every transaction is attributed to a specific person from the moment it’s made.‍

“With bank cards on a master facility, they all feed into one area. With Weel it’s more segmented, it’s easy to identify the individuals that spent that money and who still owes you receipts.” - Tracy Johnson

The result: speed, control, and a replicable process

Four years in, Weel is now a standard part of how SRJ’s CFO & Financial Solutions team sets up clients. New entities are live in three to five days once verification is complete. Onboarding is predictable, the integration is straightforward, and the ongoing maintenance is low.‍

“I really recommend it now because it gets away from having to go through that process with the banks of issuing physical credit cards and all of that when they go into the process of having to replace a card.” - Tracy Johnson

For Tracy’s bookkeeping team, the efficiency gains show up in the hours they don’t spend chasing receipts, correcting coding, or trying to reconstruct who spent what from a shared card statement. Junior accountants get more of their time back for meaningful, higher-value work.

For SRJ Walker Wayland, Weel sits at the intersection of two things Tracy has always cared about: reducing financial risk for clients, and making finance operations as efficient as possible through smart technology.

It’s become a tool the team can deploy quickly, configure precisely, and trust to keep running, whether a client has one site or six, a handful of staff or dispersed teams across multiple states.