Poorly negotiated contracts, payment for event elements that had been canceled, little oversight on total meeting and event outlays—these were a few of the issues challenging the meetings and events department for the U.K. division of consulting partnership PwC a few years ago. That’s when PwC head of hotels and venues Samantha van Leeuwen decided to overhaul the department’s payments procedure—a project that cascaded into broader meetings management transformation—with the help of travel management company Capita Travel and Events.

PwC has had a meetings management program for about 15 years, with a £23 million meeting and event budget for the July 2019 to June 2020 fiscal year. The program was focused, however, on bookings and fulfillment, and payment always went through the company’s accounts payable process, where the meetings team had no insight, van Leeuwen said. 

“We had the sourcing and the confirmation, but we had a very disjointed invoice approval process,” van Leeuwen said. Invoices arrived in accounts payable, she said, without prior approval. Accounts payable was contacting the person named on the invoice for approval, but if that was the meeting owner, everyone had to shift gears. 

“You can’t have someone booking the event also approve the event spend,” she said. “That’s basic procurement protocol.” So the process would escalate to the cost center owner, but that person might not be authorized to sign off for large dollar amounts. As a result, the company was losing time, data and accuracy and sometimes paid for event elements that had been canceled but no one was double-checking. “We [needed to] bring consistencies into our program,” said van Leeuwen. 

 A Compelling Payment Process

Van Leeuwen’s decision to drill into the meetings payment and approval process coincided with PwC U.K.’s switch to Capita’s proprietary meetings and accommodations platform, MeetingsPro. That change had been in the planning stages since 2018 with the goal of bringing PwC’s end-to-end meeting booking process online through a single portal. 

Grafting a new payment process into that project wasn’t in the original plan. It helped that Capita had a relationship with virtual payment solutions provider Conferma, but van Leeuwen said that process only contemplated transient travel. “We pushed Conferma and Capita to make it work for meetings,” van Leeuwen said. 

Here’s how it works: When a meeting organizer enters an event in the MeetingsPro system, the finance team receives those details and now can allocate a virtual payment card against that request for an exact amount. The hotel or venue then is able to draw down on that payment, van Leeuwen explained. Expenses appear on a credit card statement, which is centrally paid after reconciliation.

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The process is deceptively simple for the user, but it’s not yet fully automated. There are a few things going on behind the scenes, enabled by Capita. 

“At the moment, we have a hybrid approach, where the booking tool can produce the data needed for Conferma,” but it doesn’t feed that data directly into the Conferma platform, said Capita business solutions director Carl Law. For now, Capita project and operations teams support that transfer to ensure the correct process and format required to settle the bookings on behalf of PwC. Capita is looking to further integrate with Conferma’s API to automate virtual card creation for each event, added Law, “presenting those to suppliers and automatically settling those into the future.”

Though a new payment process initially had not been part of the MeetingsPro implementation, the addition opened two compelling opportunities for the program.

 Closing the Payment-Approval Gap 

PwC U.K. actually had clearly defined approval hierarchies for other processes within the company, but they never had been fully integrated into the meetings division. Using the existing hierarchies as a guide, van Leeuwen worked with Capita to create a centralized email approval system that allows the Capita team to collect and document proper budget approval. As a result, what started as mostly a booking platform in MeetingsPro has expanded to support a better meetings management process. 

Integrated approval requirements have put a hard stop on anyone signing off on their own events and clarified process around some unique nuances as well, said van Leeuwen. “Someone can approve £20,000” for an event, she offered as an example. “Now, if [a booker] adds another 50 delegates, they need to get their event reapproved and make sure the right person signs off.” The system, she said, now “ensures we have a completely transparent process.”

The meetings team also has realized administrative efficiencies. “They can spend more time engaging stakeholders, sourcing the right venues at the best prices … and making sure the contract is correct, as opposed to arguing over pounds and pennies or trying to find who should approve this or that amount,” van Leeuwen said. “It’s all documented now.”

Another change: Everyone booking meetings now must do so through the meetings services department for rapid and streamlined supplier payment, she said. This requirement has resulted in meetings compliance climbing from about 80 percent to 98 percent. 

Incentivizing Invoice Accuracy

The revised payment and approval process also has benefited PwC U.K.’s meeting and event suppliers. “If the invoice is correct, we will process payment immediately,” van Leeuwen said. “Some [suppliers] can get paid in one or two days. That is a great incentive.” It also has created something of a virtuous payment-and-reward cycle for PwC U.K.’s meetings team. As hotels and venues get the benefit of fast payment, they are incentivized to work more closely with PwC. Even the prospect of swift payment, said van Leeuwen, has compelled PwC partners to ensure invoices are more accurate from the get-go. 

One Thing Leads to Another

With payment and approval delivering tangible benefits, van Leeuwen drilled deeper. “In the beginning, we were just looking at how we could introduce a payment card,” she said. “But it turned into a whole deconstruction of the [program], and we said, ‘If we’re going to bring in a payment card, let’s look at other areas that might benefit from more efficiencies.’ “

Van Leeuwen jokingly referred to PwC’s instance of the Capita platform as “MeetingsPro on speed,” because the team took it from being a tool focused squarely on meetings booking to being a very powerful meetings management tool.

“We pushed Capita in quite a few different areas,” said van Leeuwen. “I’m a blue-sky person who pushes boundaries. The good thing about Capita [is that] the development team allowed me to push them, and we are still developing now.” 

Law credits the collaborative effort with the successful rollout of the program. “From day one we sat with Sam and her team and their bookers to understand what they need from the tools and our services,” Law said. “To this day, we have fortnightly meetings with Sam and the solutions project management team to understand what their needs and wants are and what those challenges are.”

Van Leeuwen credits bringing in all stakeholders from the beginning for getting the new product and procedures in place. Those stakeholders included operations, payables, control and tax teams from the finance department, as well as procurement, learning and development, the events team, IT and the Capita operations team. 

Because the stakeholders spent a lot of time working to make sure all the processes were mapped out accurately, “we had very few issues at all,” van Leeuwen said of the launch. Immediately, all event types went through the system: from small lunches, dinners and teambuilding to awards, client-facing events and more. “By engaging early with these teams, we were able to review, challenge and shape the processes collaboratively, which gave us buy-in to develop it further” she said. 

Today, she said, the whole solution is completely visible to the firm, which not only has raised the profile of her team but also garnered more support for it. “If I tried to do it on my own, it would never have worked.”

Never Too Much Visibility

By enabling all event types through the MeetingsPro platform and using the possibility of non-payment as a lever to drive 98 percent compliance through PwC’s meetings team, the horizon opened up to guide a more holistic meetings management process for virtually all PwC U.K. meetings and events.  

The meetings team now reviews contracts and notes details, such as how far in advance an event—or even a single event element—needs to be canceled without having to pay fees. Van Leeuwen’s team has avoided numerous spend traps as a result.

“We have very capable teams within PwC who can manage invoicing and check against the event information and what needs to be paid or not paid,” van Leeuwen said. “But we also have people [outside the meetings team] at PwC who may not understand some of the rules around cancellations [or] attrition. That you’re able to cancel 20 percent of your event seven days in advance. They would forget those nuances … whereas [the meetings team is] very cleaned up on the contracts.”

The process continues to reduce risk for the company “significantly, because we now have visibility over everything,” she said. “Once you start looking at what people are signing up to, you realize we’ve reduced risk across all areas.”

Robust Reporting 

Better reporting was another side benefit. The department’s reports now are run directly from Conferma payment data and with MeetingsPro, “which can provide real-time management information based on bookings, which [the meetings team] didn’t have access to previously,” Law said. “We have a number of features within the platform that allows for bookers themselves or someone like Sam or a procurement manager to log into the system and see in real time everybody’s bookings, the values of those bookings and when they are taking place.”

“We require a significant amount of formatted data to upload into our finance systems for accurate reporting and payment,” van Leeuwen said. “This allows us to run all our taxation reports for meetings and events as well. This cannot be underestimated, as the tax coding for meetings and events in a partnership is very complex.”

Better reporting leads to better budgeting. “We are just coming into the budgeting process so we are asking people to register their meetings for next year so we have an idea of what the spend will be in the various areas,” van Leeuwen said. To that end, Capita built the ability to register intent to book and for cost centers to view that information. 

Next Steps

The tool already is accessible to PwC systems via a single sign-on, but ongoing iterations of it include bringing in more automation and coding of events for more accuracy, automated secure emails for payments and automating multiple approvals, van Leeuwen said. 

Cancellation and attrition threshold notification is on the roadmap as well, along with a chatbot to query specific bookings, invoices, contracts and to answer questions. So is a refreshed look and feel, incorporating Covid-19 health and safety information, sustainability markers that identify hotels and venues with green policies, an improved venue database and direct bookings for smaller events.

“The venues are still not quite there yet, to be able to book a meeting and event like you book a hotel room,” van Leeuwen said. “For the less complex events, I’d like to have an end-to-end booking process, so [an organizer] can go into the tool, select the venue, get the permissions and be able to book and contract it. That is where we are moving to.”

Then the team will not be a “booker team, they can be true consultants,” she said, adding that they won’t be so focused on the administration side of events, and the artificial intelligence and bots can take away some of the questions.

“We are taking time to tidy up the back-end processes and improve some of the efficiencies around it,” van Leeuwen said. “When meetings and events come back again, it will make meeting services even better than it is today.” 

PwC’s New Meetings Tools Delivered Clear Advantages During Covid-19

About halfway through the first fiscal year of PwC’s new program, Covid-19 devastated the meetings industry. Having meetings data all in one place enabled the meetings team move quickly on canceling, moving and changing events—and, most importantly, locating employees, van Leeuwen said. 

PwC had authorized Capita Travel & Events’ MeetingsPro platform to feed data to risk management firm International SOS, “so we were able to track some of our meetings as various regions of the world started to close down,” she added. “We were able to do that at the press of a button and have the accuracy and the knowledge that we knew where everything was at that time … and were able to mitigate that.”

The new platform also helped move PwC events quickly from 2020 into 2021 and 2022 as spaces were becoming more of a premium, van Leeuwen noted, positioning the program for a robust recovery when the time is right.