Lewis Land utilise Eftsure to decentralise finance team

Overview

Lewis Land is Australia’s oldest private property developer and have developed more than 20,000 residential lots along Australia’s coastline, transforming mangroves into masterpieces and dreams into reality. A family-owned business founded in 1957, Lewis Lands’ core businesses include residential, retail and leisure developments, creating communities where people can live, work, shop and relax.

Challenge

For a lot of businesses – including Lewis Land, historically – finance sits at a central, head-office level. This structure can work for smaller finance teams. But, for larger teams with multiple entities and assets, it can slow down transactions and heighten the risk of fraud. As Lewis Land burst through a critical phase of both growth and technology innovation, hundreds of new suppliers were being onboarded and payments were becoming more frequent.

At an authoriser level, staff were spending more time on questions around who was being paid in each pay run, how much they were being paid and what process each supplier had been through. At an AP level, the team was spending more time than ever on manually creating and verifying new suppliers or processing requests to change supplier details.

This massive increase in supplier interactions, combined with an all-time high in payment fraud in 2022, meant Lewis Land had no room for inefficiencies.

Approach

When Allenby joined Lewis Land, it was important to him to build and maintain secure systems and controls. Allenby says Eftsure was the missing link in taking this next step and allowing each entity to run finance and report that through to the head office. This gave individuals at a local level the ability to “make decisions and really own their numbers.” When authorising payments, Allenby no longer wanted to rely on faith —instead, he wanted to use technology to support his team.

Allenby made the careful decision to add Eftsure to the tech stack that already supported their AP function. With Eftsure in place, Allenby could not only avoid scrolling through a “bunch of numbers” and hoping that the processes had been followed, but he could identify inefficiencies in other processes as well. This gave him the opportunity to engage with the team in a more meaningful way and have more impactful, data-driven discussions.

Results

By having Eftsure’s software sitting over Lewis Lands banking system, Allenby has been able to get an easy and trustworthy snapshot of each payment, from each entity, and can make an informed decision on whether the payment is “good to go.”

Since implementing Eftsure, Lewis Land have:

• Reduced risk. By utilising Eftsure efficiently, the AP team at Lewis Land no longer need to manually verify supplier details and can now sleep at night knowing that they’re mitigating the inevitable risks of human error.
• Saved time. With Eftsure providing a robust verification process and streamlined supplier onboarding process, Allenby estimated that they’re saving a week out of every month, at both a venue and head office level. This has been a crucial step in enabling the team to focus on other growth-impacting tasks across the business.
• Increased visibility and control. Eftsure’s simple yet effective traffic light system gives team members, from AP to an exec level, the insights they need to make an informed decision about which suppliers are safe to pay and when to investigate further. Plus, Eftsure has flexibility in regard to segregation of duties, meaning admins can keep access controlled and in line with their internal accessibility policies.
• Improved company culture. By decentralising their financial operations, Lewis Lands’ finance team feel a new level of trust and faith.