A new dimension of online shopping
The Company
Clothing, shoes, accessories – for fashion enthusiasts, online shopping often leads to ABOUT YOU. Founded in 2014 as a subsidiary of Otto, ABOUT YOU is one of Europe's fastest-growing e-commerce companies. Its impressive success story: in 2018, it became Hamburg's first unicorn, and in 2021, it went public. In the 2021/22 fiscal year, ABOUT YOU generated revenue of 1.73 billion euros. Today, a team of 1,500 employees from 77 nations is dedicated to providing customers with a personalized shopping experience on their smartphones.
The company's Finance department consists of Controlling, Tax, Treasury, and Accounting. Within ABOUT YOU's Accounting department, 35 employees work in Sales Accounting, Merchandise Accounting, and Non-Merchandise Accounting.
Peak performance requires state-of-the-art technologies
The Motivation
For ABOUT YOU, the use of modern technologies is a central aspect when it comes to employee satisfaction. As part of the company's digital transformation, the online retailer was looking for a solution that simplifies the reporting of travel expenses and outlays, both for users and for employees in Accounting and HR. What was needed was a modern tool that integrates perfectly into the existing system landscape, is continuously optimized by the provider, and allows for customization.
„The previous expense management solution no longer suited our company and our employees. Circula offers us a platform that is perfectly tailored to our requirements. This significantly simplifies our work.“ Katharina Baldus, Senior Accountant
State-of-the-art in expense management too
The Initial Situation
To accommodate the company's rapid growth, ABOUT YOU decided to elevate its HR system landscape to the next level. First, under the direction of Marcel Ziebold, who is responsible for HR Controlling, Data & Systems at ABOUT YOU, the master data system was completely replaced.
To make company processes more efficient and automate them as much as possible, Marcel Ziebold and his colleagues then focused on harmonizing the connected system landscapes. It quickly became clear that the previous expense management solution did not meet the requirements for user-friendliness and caused frustration for everyone involved: The entire process was extremely cumbersome and time-consuming. For example, employees who wanted to submit travel expenses first had to write an email to the payroll team, which then created and activated the person – an enormous effort for the team with 1,500 employees. Even for the employees themselves – especially those who travel frequently – the process was anything but convenient. Furthermore, ABOUT YOU perceived the service provider's support as inadequate.
There was also a clear need for optimization from the perspective of Katharina Baldus, who, as Senior Accountant at ABOUT YOU, is responsible for Group Accounting and Payroll and acts as an interface between HR and Accounting. In Accounting, too, the process caused a high manual effort, as there were no options to use interfaces. Thus, there was no connection to SAP or the company's internal payment tool. In addition, manual submission and especially the complicated splitting of receipts took a lot of time and burdened employees.
A new solution therefore had to be found to automate the processes and thus relieve the payroll team and accounting. On the other hand, the tool should offer employees a positive user experience when submitting their receipts through the simplest possible handling.
„With the old system, expense reporting was no fun. When I think of our teams who travel a lot and constantly have to submit receipts, I wouldn't have wanted to trade places with them.” Marcel Ziebold ,Teamlead HR Analytics & Systems
In demand: Individually configured interfaces for seamless integration
The Challenges
In the search for a best-in-class expense management solution, the decision clearly favored the Expenses tool from the Circula portfolio. Key factors were, firstly, the existing interfaces, which allowed the Circula solution to integrate seamlessly into ABOUT YOU's system landscape. Secondly, the user-friendliness for employees was a major plus. Receipts can be easily scanned on the go with the smartphone app or submitted with a single click via email.
