From 16 hours a week to two: How GLAS automated corporate spend

Kamaal Morrison

Assistant Financial Accountant, GLAS

“Before working with Airwallex, our operations were very manual. Our main issue was the time it was taking to get spend from submission into the firm’s accounting platform – and that's where Airwallex really streamlined the process.”

Introduction

Many businesses invest in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions like NetSuite, only to find their finance teams still relying on spreadsheets, manual uploads, and fragmented approval workflows. An ERP rollout alone does not remove back-office friction; the systems around it also need to be connected.

For GLAS, a fast-growing loan agency operating across 12 entities and ten countries, that challenge became increasingly clear as the business expanded internationally. Ironically, this rapid expansion is exactly when many enterprise finance teams find themselves hitting a wall – discovering that their global operational complexity has completely outgrown their manual workflows.

The challenge: Rapid growth, manual processes

At the time, GLAS was scaling quickly. In just one year, the business migrated from SAP and Xero to NetSuite, acquired four new entities across four countries, and grew headcount by 74%, from 300 to 523 employees.

The pressure of that rapid growth showed up most clearly in accounts payable. For corporate expenses, the team had to wait for physical Barclaycard paper statements, read through PDFs line by line, and manually key transaction logs into its accounting platform. Out-of-pocket reimbursements followed a similarly manual path: employees emailed Excel breakdowns, managers approved by email, and the accounts payable team uploaded every claim manually.

When the business was smaller, these workflows took roughly eight hours a week to manage. But with 12 entities now in operation, that time was on track to double – peaking at 15–16 hours a week and impacting the team’s ability to focus on critical, higher-value financial tasks.

The solution: Scaling a proven AI-powered operating model

The silver lining: the finance team at GLAS already had a model they trusted. The business had used Airwallex for two years in its Australian entity on Xero, meaning they already had firsthand proof of the platform's reliability and ease of use. When looking for a better way to manage accounts payable globally during the NetSuite rollout, they had a trusted operational blueprint ready to go. Airwallex was the obvious choice for GLAS, rolling out the platform across all eight global locations to manage both corporate cards and employee reimbursements.

Another key deciding factor in that global rollout was Airwallex’s comprehensive, native integration with NetSuite. Instead of wrestling with custom-built API connectors or manual CSV data uploads, all transaction, expense, and reimbursement fields now sync to the ERP solution. This automated pipeline removed the manual data entry that had previously slowed down month-end reporting.

Kamaal Morrison

Assistant Financial Accountant, GLAS

“Due to Airwallex’s native integration with NetSuite, the rollout across GLAS’s global operations was fast. Now, whenever we’re onboarding someone new, we just send them an invite to the right entity, get them set up on the system, and it’s smooth sailing.”

The results: Less admin, greater efficiency

For the finance team

• Substantial admin reduction: Weekly card and reimbursement processing time fell from a projected 15–16 hours to just 2–3 hours.

• Reduced data duplication: Removed the need for manual data entry entirely by syncing expenses and reimbursements directly into NetSuite.

• Unified global visibility: Gained a clear, centralised view of international spend across 12 entities for faster reviews and audits.

• Workforce optimisation: Instead of scaling headcount to keep pace with manual workflows, GLAS’s finance team can now support a larger, more complex business with the same lean structure.

For the broader business

• Scalable growth foundation: Built a resilient financial infrastructure that can support continued international growth and new market acquisitions without adding back-office overhead.

• True enterprise flexibility: Combined NetSuite’s ERP capabilities with Airwallex’s cross-border flexibility, allowing GLAS to acquire new companies, enter new countries, and onboard employees in a matter of clicks.

Why this partnership works

The GLAS narrative illustrates an important enterprise lesson: an ERP is only as powerful as the data pipelines feeding it. By pairing NetSuite with Airwallex, GLAS eliminated the friction between employee spend and ledger reconciliation. The result is a stronger operational foundation, allowing the finance team at GLAS to focus on what really matters: growth.