PEX commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to quantify the benefits organizations may realize by deploying PEX.¹ This abstract will focus on construction organizations’ use of PEX and its value to their organizations. It draws on insights from three decision-makers at two US-based construction companies, including:

• A controller at an organization with $50 million in annual revenue and 100 employees.

• A finance manager and an accounts payable specialist at a firm with $44 million in annual revenue and 130 employees.

Construction firms operate in decentralized, jobsite-driven environments, resulting in complex financial workflows with thousands of transactions across remote, dispersed crews and projects.

Prior to adopting PEX, the interviewees’ organizations were much smaller in scale. The finance manager noted starting with 35 to 40 employees using prepaid cards before gradually migrating to corporate cards. They relied on prepaid and bank cards that were very difficult to track and offered limited spend controls. These fragmented card programs required manual receipt collection and lacked real-time visibility, leading to compliance risks, misallocated expenses, and labor-intensive monthly close cycles.

The above challenges became more pronounced as both interviewees’ organizations experienced rapid growth — in some cases doubling in size annually. They required a customizable, agile, and scalable corporate card and expense management system that could provide financial control, real-time visibility and integrate seamlessly with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms.

Interviewees shared that they issued PEX² Visa® Prepaid Cards and PEX Visa® Commercial Cards, which were physical and virtual corporate cards and temporary “shop cards” with configurable limits, auto-approval and auto-enforcer rules. The interviewees’ employees used these cards primarily for job-site expenses, travel-related costs, such as fuel, and materials. They also maintained a small number of vendor cards for special purposes. The controller noted that they were transitioning from PEX prepaid to PEX charge cards to better track spend by employee, streamline reconciliation, and capture cash rebates.

With PEX, interviewees captured receipts instantly via mobile devices and improved data accuracy and compliance by syncing transactions directly to ERP systems. The finance manager explained: “We’ve just grown a lot, [and] we expect to continue to grow. … PEX has been a great partner [for] us and [has grown] with us.”

Investment Drivers For Construction Industry

The interviewees’ organizations adopted PEX to address the following key challenges:

• Financial visibility and control with real-time spend tracking, customizable spend limits, and controls.

• Streamlined expense management and scalability to improve data accuracy and provide a faster reconciliation process across dozens of projects and remote locations.

• Compliance and audit readiness improvements to reduce risk and administrative burden.

• Workforce enablement by shifting accountability for spend management from finance teams to employees.

• Payment flexibility and rebates by transitioning from prepaid to corporate cards.

Key Results For Construction Industry

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

PEX automation tools improving productivity and compliance. Interviewees expressed significant time savings across their finance teams and broader workforces after the adoption of PEX. They cited the following benefits:

• Enhanced compliance with customizable controls. Interviewees reported using PEX to assign corporate cards to different employee groups (e.g., field crews, operators, project managers, and administrative staff) with tailored spend limits and tagging aligned expenses with job codes and divisions and resulted in accurate cost allocation and transparency. The controller described: “We can set [a crew member’s] limit to $500 in a day or $200 per day if he only needs small purchases. For a project manager we trust, we can set $5,000 a month and $2,000 daily.”
  
  The controller said that prior to PEX, employees erroneously spent money or miscoded the expenses or lacked receipts, which could lead to additional liabilities during audits. They noted, “We might not get receipts attached to the transactions and then get a sales tax audit and have to pay taxes on them — tax on tax and the interest and fee.”

This interviewee further explained that they have close to 70 projects at all times, stating, “We have a huge job list of open jobs that we’re working on, and as a job closes or a new job opens, that list is pinned with our ERP system.” PEX automatic sync prevents employees from miscoding, charging expenses to closed jobs, eliminating errors in financial reporting, and reducing audit risk.

• Improved employee productivity through PEX automation. Interviewees’ finance teams reported that PEX features, such as auto enforcer and auto approval, reduced manual effort and improved employee and finance team efficiencies. They also noted that PEX offered AI-powered receipt matching that automatically read and linked texted or emailed receipts to transactions, further streamlining reconciliation.
  Interviewees said that PEX enabled field crews to capture receipts in real time via their mobile devices, eliminating the need to drop off paper receipts at the corporate office, reducing delays and errors associated with manual processes.

The accounts payable specialist explained: “Auto enforcer helped us maintain the level of compliance for the field crew. It gives them basically five days to complete their transactions. ... [After that], it will block their card. It forces them to complete everything, [and] it allows us to close our month in books in a timely manner.” They added that field crews no longer needed to contact finance on routine approval expenses. Transactions were approved automatically under predefined rules and did not require receipts for expenses below $75, i.e., the IRS receipt threshold.

The finance manager stated, “We used to have three or four of us sporadically in the system doing approvals on a daily basis. That was probably close to a full-time job for us, equal to 1 FTE. Now, [one of us is handling it] on a weekly basis. Significant time saved there.”

Furthermore, the controller explained that PEX auto approval and spend controls prevented unnecessary spend by requiring confirmation prior to increasing spending limits. In one instance, a $1,300 truck registration was declined because it exceeded the preset limit, allowing management to review and ultimately avoid the expense.

Interviewees’ organizations took different approaches regarding the PEX auto-tagger feature. The finance manager explained that because their field workforce operated in remote, nondesk environments, they kept their auto-tagging process simple. The controller noted that they partially adopted the tool, using it to automatically assign expenses to divisions, such as electrical, site work, or trucking, based on employee groupings and planned on expanding its usage to categories like fuel or materials once their transition from prepaid to charge cards was complete.

Increased efficiency for the finance team during the fiscal closing process. Interviewees reported that PEX transformed their close processes from manual, error-prone, and time-consuming to automated, streamlined, and auditable.

• Interviewees reported that PEX transformed their month-end close process from manual and laborious to streamlined and efficient. The controller stated: “[Since PEX syncs automatically with our ERP systems], I don’t have to make a manual journal entry for each transaction or bulk transaction. I just hit approve if it looks right and it gets pulled, then I’m good.”

• This interviewee further explained that they spend about “15 hours per month” to get everything reconciled in PEX. Before, the process took closer to “40 hours a month.” They stated, “Probably one-quarter of one person’s job was just handling and entering credit card and journal entries.”

Avoided cost of hires. Interviewees reported that PEX enabled their organizations to maintain lean finance teams as their companies scaled.

• The interviewees reported that their organizations experienced double-digit growth, expanding their operations across multiple geographic locations and doubling employee count. The controller stated that their organization grew year over year by 25% since it implemented PEX two years ago and now processes over 6,000 transactions annually. They explained: “It would be quite simple to add [extra employees] to [PEX] and just have them fit into the flow. It would be a bigger volume of a report, but it would be the same amount of work.”

• The finance manager estimated that with PEX, their organization saved one to two FTEs annually, which enabled it to keep its finance team small and efficient. She noted that their organization implemented PEX in 2021 and added: “We about doubled every year. … We expect to continue to grow … possibly by end of this year have 200 employees.”

Interviewees highlighted three major unquantified benefits of adopting PEX:

• Increased return from rewards program. Their organizations benefited from the monthly rebate of 1% cash back that PEX offers on their qualified corporate card spend, which ranged anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000, depending on the organization and seasonal activity.

• Strong partnership. Interviewees praised PEX for its reliability and responsiveness and noted that strong support contributed to confidence in its secure and evolving platform. The controller explained that a dedicated customer success manager was assigned to their account to address any issues and review desired improvements on a weekly basis.

• PEX implementation. Interviewees described that PEX onboarding was simple and fast, with set up for each employee taking 10 to 15 minutes at headquarters, followed by a brief tutorial to learn the program. The controller explained, “A lot of the guys [construction crew] are in the flow of it and [PEX] makes sense for them.” The finance manager reinforced the ease of adoption, noting, “[It takes] 10 minutes. It is very, very simple for our everyday employees.”