By Ben McCarthy, founder, Premier Events
Last month I wrote about the Premier Hub, the one place all our internal tools now live, and I promised real numbers once the whole team had access.
They’ve had it for a few weeks now. Here’s what the numbers say, and then the bit I’ve been wanting to write about since the first column: receipts.
First, the headline. 47 people have submitted something through the Hub since it went live, out of a team of 55.
Not “logged in” or “had a look”, but actually put a leave request, a receipt, an expense claim or a question through it. In just over a month, 80 leave and TOIL requests have gone through from the team, 70 of them holiday, and the manager approval that used to take eight steps and three people now takes one notification and a click.
The expenses module has only been live since 3 September and has already handled 44 claims from 17 people.
It hasn’t all been perfect. The Ask Me Anything tool, which lets the team ask questions about company policy and pulls an answer from a database, has had a mixed start. 80 questions asked, which tells me people want it, but only 31 came back with a proper answer.
The rest got a polite version of “I don’t have that in front of me”. So I’m going through all of the questions and adding in the correct answers, so that next time the same question is asked it’s answered correctly.
Which brings me to the other honest bit. Feedback from the team has been really positive. It’s massively improved their working lives, but I’ve also got a long list of bugs to work through. I’m spending a lot of my time at the moment fixing things people have found, and that’s exactly what you’d expect when 50-odd people start using software that had previously only been used by me during testing. It will calm down once I stop rolling out new modules every week. I haven’t stopped yet.
Now, receipts.
When I started this column back in the summer, the next-month teaser was “automating receipt handling so the money spent lands against the correct event”. That took longer than I expected, and I think it’s ended up being one of the most useful things in the Hub.
The old process had two halves and both were manual. Somebody buys something for a job. They add the cost to Current, our rental management system, so the event budget knows about it. Then, separately, they get the receipt into Xero so accounts can pay and file it. Two systems, two entries, and plenty of chances for one to happen without the other, which is how you end up with a job that looks profitable until the bills arrive. Expenses worked the same way.
Now a receipt is uploaded once in the Hub, and the person picks the job it belongs to from a list. That single upload goes to Dext, which reads it, on to Xero as a draft bill, and then a cost line lands against the right job in Current. Nobody re-keys anything. Since it went live, in the first 2 weeks, 98 receipts have gone through it from 30 different people, and the majority have already come back approved in Xero with a cost sitting against the correct job.
The bit that took the time wasn’t the upload screen. It was making the three systems agree with each other. My original workflow tried to guess the job number by pattern-matching whatever people typed, and it failed silently whenever the number was in the wrong place, which was often. Replacing that with a simple “pick the job” list was the single biggest fix. The data then all matched and the number of failed uploads went to nearly zero. There have been a few small bugs that needed to be fixed along the way, but the system is now working reliably which I’m delighted with.
Receipts wasn’t the only thing that shipped. Between 31st August and 10th September, working with Anthropic’s newest model, Claude Fable 5.1, I put six more systems into daily use. An enquiry triage system, so new enquiries can be allocated to the team, bosses get a reminder if nothing’s happened in a few hours, and hand over automatically if someone’s away. A shared calendar that pulls live bookings out of Current so anyone can see what’s provisional and what’s about to clash. A proper draft risk-assessment tool for project managers to use.
An event tracker for the Premier Connects team that holds the event register, the GDPR retention log and a live crew view in one place. A live org chart which takes its data straight from Office 365, and let us cancel a third-party paid app that wasn’t nearly as good. And our data-protection register, the record UK GDPR requires us to keep, rebuilt from scratch and checked against every system we genuinely run today.
The more I have been working through these projects, the more I realise that it really does need to be somebody who knows the business really well to create these modules and workflows. The value comes from the fact that I know the business. The AI can do the coding, but it needs the context of why we’re asking it to do what we do.
If you’re running a business, my advice hasn’t changed. Don’t design the whole platform. Fix the thing that’s quietly annoying someone this week. Ours was leave, then receipts, and everything else has grown around them.