Standish Management Celebrates Enhanced Control & Insights with Navan

Standish Management provides complete fund administration services and tailored technology solutions for emerging and established firms. It manages over $500 billion in assets under administration while servicing new partners and emerging funds. The company assists general partners with the administration of select funds or whole fund families. As Standish Management began to experience a high level of growth, they started looking for tools to better coordinate their business travel and streamline their employee expense processes.

Challenges Before Navan

Standish Management was looking to upgrade its expense management system and was also in need of a travel management provider. When the team started its search for a new solution in 2020, it was looking for an integrated solution that would meet all its needs.

As the Information Technology Advisor at Standish Management, Kristen Ruffin uses Navan daily. Her role is pivotal in managing the team member experience and onboarding more than 300 team members annually.

“Everything was very manual before Navan,” said Ruffin. “The expense management process was cumbersome. We only had two approvers for things, so team members waited to be reimbursed.”

Why Navan Was the Right Choice

The Standish Management team had a few ideas for the features they sought in a new T&E partner. They wanted greater visibility, configurable policy controls, and to issue more physical and virtual cards to team members.

“With our previous system, only a handful of people had physical cards. As more team members traveled for client meetings, they had to pay out of pocket,” said Ruffin.

The team also wanted greater visibility into what people were spending and the ability to dispute a charge if they felt it was inappropriate or outside the scope of their project. The team loved that they could build configurable spend parameters for everyday purchases and travel.

“One of the biggest pieces Navan could offer compared to other options was its integrated travel management tool,” said Ruffin. “We knew we would be ramping up travel and wanted a better solution for travel and expense management to provide a better end-user experience.”

Implementation Is in the Details

While Standish Management selected Navan for its automated expense experience, the corporate travel management tools sweetened the deal. Navan partnered with the team throughout the implementation process to ensure all its policies and parameters were established within the software.

“Once you've taken the time to think through and consult with your team about what you're looking for, need, and are trying to restrict and achieve with these different parameters, Navan helps you configure the policies and understand how to best use the software for your organization. Then you're off to the races,” said Ruffin, who emphasized how important Navan’s integration with Netsuite was to their setup.

“Navan was very much a partner in the onboarding process. They also provided tons of training materials, resources, and guides, so we did not have to recreate anything from scratch.”

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Fast reimbursement means so much to team members. There's also the ease of submitting expenses directly from your phone.

Kristen Ruffin

Information Technology Advisor

Results with Navan

With Standish Management's previous expense management system, reimbursement had to go through payroll. With Navan, it can go directly to the team member's bank account and is done much faster. The team member receives the reimbursement within days after the expense is approved.

Standish Management is a hybrid workplace where people can purchase home office equipment to work efficiently and comfortably. To support this process, the company offers every team member up to $500 to supplement their home office equipment. With Navan Expense, people make their purchases, submit them through the system, and are reimbursed within days.

“Fast reimbursement means so much to team members. There's also the ease of submitting expenses directly from your phone,” says Ruffin.

With Navan's intuitive policy controls, expenses can be configured to be automatically approved. For example, Standish Management decided that all parking under $20 would be automatically approved, which saves approvers’ time.

Navan’s intuitive, simple user interface leads to substantial time savings and more timely expense submission. Previously, many stragglers would wait to collect all their expenses and submit them in batches, which took a lot of work. The company has also empowered more managers to approve expenses, which saves time and money compared to the previous situation, in which two approvers had to review every expense.

The team can also easily switch who approves expenses within the app. They can transfer expense management to a different manager who might have been more involved in a project and have more context for the expenses.

Navan Expense Delivers Customized Solutions & Heightened Visibility

Navan Expense makes it easy for Standish Management to assign specific corporate cards for specific use cases.

The company hosts many projects and events across its 14 offices, so the procurement team can assign a card with a set budget to a particular office and change the policy if needed. The card is linked to the appropriate accounting coding, which allows visibility into who is spending what. The team also leverages the Navan dashboard to access spend reports for specific cards.

Standish Management gives physical corporate cards to people of a certain level – generally senior managers and above.

Designing the Future with Navan

Standish Management hosts an annual manager training and leverages Navan Group Travel to send attendees an invite with the dates and hotel block. Managers only need to book their flights, which can be done quickly, since all the other details are provided through the feature. The organizing team can see who has accepted the invitation and booked their flights.

“Navan Group Travel gives us a broader visibility into the pre-planning logistics. It's a great tool for us,” says Ruffin.

They can also restrict who can book what kind of seat or room based on their role in the company.

“We can customize team members' travel options based on their rank or project and tag certain travel requirements for each client. We have access to far greater granular reporting.”

Growing Together: How Feedback Drives Progress

Standish Management is growing quickly and confidently with modern travel and expense management tools that automate routine tasks and elevate team members’ responsibilities to more strategic initiatives.

“The Navan product constantly improves, and the team takes customer feedback seriously,” said Ruffin. “It's great to see feedback translated into feature updates; it highlights how Navan is a true partner to Standish Management. The Navan team doesn't just say, 'Here's our product,’ but rather, 'we're going to iterate to make it better for you.'"

"As Standish Management grows, our needs change,” said Ruffin. “As we grow, Navan grows, and it feels like we're moving at a similar fast pace. It feels good to have a peer on your side."

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