<div><em>Happay takes a bet on 50 million SMBs who are struggling to streamline their expense management, writes <strong>Vishal Krishna</strong></em></div><div> </div><div>Tracking expenses in an organisation is very difficult. Even today an employee has to submit bills. Many of these bills cannot be verified and there are also many cash payments that companies cannot keep track of. Today a business worth Rs 100 crore, spends at least Rs 5 crore on admin related expenses and some of these expenses cannot be tracked. There are no payment solutions integrated into the systems of companies. There is an ERP system to place orders. But payments cannot be paid because there are many layers of approval needed. To disrupt this archaic system, Happay, a startup from Bangalore, as created an expense management app that enables departments of various organisations to manage all their vendors and expenses. All small businesses order online but they pay only through cash on delivery. The problem is that the owner would have told his cashier that all payments can be made only after his approval. The business delivering the product has to run around 10 odd times to get the money. Similarly employees too have run to their office accounts to get their expenses disbursed. Offices spend a considerable time in checking their expenses. This conundrum is being solved by this 2 year old startup. </div><div> </div><div>Anshul Rai and Varun Rathi, batchmates of IIT-Kharagpur in 2010, founded the company with a business to consumer (B2C) model where people could transfer money to anyone from their app. However since this market was not scalable and did not add any value. They decided to pivot the model and focus on payment solutions for SMEs. “While we were building the consumer business, a couple of SMBs approached us to create a payment solution for them. This was how the idea was born,” says Anshul, the CEO of the company.</div><div> </div><div>Their business is funded by Prime Venture Partners, who have put in $500,000 to make the business scale up. </div><div> </div><div>Today India has over 600,000 FMCG distributors, 50 million small enterprises and 500,000 corporate entities that work with small businesses. There are payments systems needed to make the system robust and transparent. There are over 40 million organised workers in India and 150 million semi-organised workers. The payments industry is worth more than $1 trillion and is waiting for technology to pay a major role in its disruption. Happay is not the first solution for the business to business industry. But it is the first one to think through from an Indian context. It is only a matter of time before PayPal, Square, Amazon and Dwolla figure it out for the Indian context.</div><div> </div><div>Happay has a wonderful model of issuing corporate cards to all its employees and the card is managed by the accounts team of the organisation. Happay gives them real time dashboards of expenses made by employees during a sales meeting in another city. These cards are issued by a bank which has partnered with Visa. The co-branded cards, of Ratnakar Bank and Visa, which Happay issues, once with the organisation, will be loaded with money and given to the employees for their expenses. Say for example a management executive on a sales visit will stay at a 3-star hotel and pay for food there. The average daily bill can be Rs 8,000 and this can be tracked by the Happay App. The corporate credit card is just one line of business. The also help automate expense management and are also getting in to vendor payments on the manufacturing side where their systems pull money from the bank account of the entity to pay the vendor. Typically their technology will be the bridge between the manufacturer, the vendor and the bank.</div><div> </div>
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