As leading accountants and business advisors, McCulloch & Partners are in the business of solving problems. They need to pull out the right tool at the right time. That's exactly what happened when their client came to them with a classic small business headache: dozens of crew members making urgent purchases on personal cards, receipts going walkabout, and cost overruns surfacing months after the damage was done.

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The problem

‍McCulloch & Partners' client manages events across the South Island. Their crew are first in, last out, constantly buying fuel, freight and consumables on the road. Traditional corporate cards were too slow and rigid, particularly with a predominantly casual crew that would scale up and down depending on the time of year. Manual reimbursements were drowning the finance team and the director's credit card would go on weekend road trips, increasing business risks.

The McCulloch & Partners team could see the workflow gap and the risk to their client, but until recently they had no elegant way to close it.

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Enter Emerge (their new superpower)

‍Within a fortnight of McCulloch & Partners onboarding their client onto Emerge, they'd issued virtual and physical debit cards to the team, each with customised limits and real-time transaction feeds straight into Xero.

Petty cash tins disappeared. Weekend receipt hunts ended. McCulloch & Partners can now reconcile a festival weekend of expenses in a fully compliant manner in under an hour.

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From gatekeeper to game changer

‍The client can see expenses by their team on the road in real time, pre-empting budget blowouts, instead of reporting on them months after the damage is done. The integration with Xero provides further benefits for the finance team.

Recommending an expense management tool that goes live at speed makes McCulloch & Partners look like problem solvers, not compliance costs. The crew love tapping a phone to pay, and directors love instant insights. These experiences reinforce the firm's expertise at every transaction.

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The numbers that matter

‍Their client's admin time plummeted and compliance with taxable supply information requirements increased. Expense visibility went from monthly to live. Crew satisfaction spiked once contractors stopped funding company expenses from their own pockets.

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The bigger picture

‍When McCulloch & Partners deliver the right digital tools, they move from year-end historians to essential partners. Emerge didn't just solve their client's expense problem, we elevated their entire advisory offering. That's the kind of transformation that helps push the wider economy toward genuine productivity gains while making the advisory firm look pretty clever in the process.

Ready to transform your advisory practice like McCulloch & Partners? Let's talk.