After spending nearly a decade working as engineers in the construction industry, founders David Stewart and Joe Turner built Vendrix to solve the problems they faced. While the work was exciting, they wanted to fix what they saw as a broken system as it related to corporate cards, expenses, and managing spending across all items in construction. Anything that didn’t fall under permanent material or a subcontract was where Vendrix would help. Small tools and supplies, fuel, travel and entertainment, office expenses, permits, and the list goes on. These types of purchases can account for up to 10% of a project on the higher end and always for at least 2%. With construction spending exceeding $1.5 trillion annually, the total market value of solving this problem is massive.
They were spending a disproportionate amount of their time managing this cost. Not only that, they noticed other employees like controllers and the accounts payable department were spending just as much time if not more. A few general solutions were targeting other industries, but ignoring construction. Something had to be done to help.
David worked on the Oroville Dam’s spillway emergency repair project in Northern California. Over the course of 6 weeks, he charged his corporate travel card daily and stockpiled the center console of his car with receipts, growing frustrated with the fact that charges wouldn’t actually show up on the expense management system until days after swiping the card. This forced him to have to do a long, time-consuming expense report for all of the project-related charges. There had to be an automated way to set this up to eliminate the manual work.
Joe remembers at the end of the month, usually a Friday (or Saturday) afternoon when the project was winding down, several of the Field Supervisors would come to him with handfuls of crumpled receipts needing for him to do their expense reports for them. What were all of the purchases? They were all of the “emergency” items that didn’t get bought with a purchase order or at a vendor with an account. They were also meals, travel, fuel, and much more. All job or overhead related, and all legitimate charges, but who knows what portion of the project it is related to or what cost code to assign to it? He had to figure that out after the fact when no one seemed able to remember. Not only was this a time-consuming and mundane task, but all of that cost wasn’t being realized because the expenses had not been submitted. This was a huge problem as he was required to know his “cost vs. budget” at all times. He also realized that by ‘approving’ these expense reports, he wasn’t actually approving anything. The money had already been spent. He was simply approving where they were coded. Even the purchases made at corporate vendors that were (sometimes) put on a purchase order caused double work for several employees. The controller or accounts payable department would always call him to ask about several charges in order to pay an invoice. As it was a month later no one could remember what the charges were for. There had to be a better way.
The founders built Vendrix in 2020 to create a corporate card and spend management process uniquely for construction. This was only possible from personally experiencing the industry-specific problems. Today, Vendrix customers save 1 entire week of administrative, accounting, and expensing work every month.
Customers see an average value of $37,125 annual savings through a combination of work hours saved and real time controls on spending. There are no monthly or signup fees to use Vendrix corporate cards and spend management software.
Interested in partnering with Vendrix? We’d love to hear from you.
Contact UsSend us a message and someone from the Vendrix team will reach out shortly.
