Margaritaville at Sea closes the month in 2-3 days with Mesh Payments

When Covid hit and lending got tighter for many companies, Margaritaville at Sea was faced with a new challenge: staying on top of continuously paying down the corporate card credit line to free up spend to cover expenses — from IT vendors to travel for its crew members. But the friction and inefficiencies of their traditional corporate card also opened up the finance team’s eyes to the value of a modern spend management platform.

Mesh’s built-in travel policy enforcement and automatic receipt capture and tagging capabilities gave the finance team real-time control of every travel expense and eliminated the need for manual expense reporting — saving the finance team hours every month.

Margaritaville at Sea is a one-ship cruise line that hosts three-day, two-night cruises between West Palm Beach and Freeport, Bahamas. Margaritaville at Sea has teams across Florida — both on the corporate side and the crews on the cruise ship — so there’s an array of recurring and one-time expenses that come up.

During Covid, tighter card restrictions meant the finance team had to pay down the card multiple times every week in order to place more charges on it. This meant they also had to make a lot of payments via other methods.

“Most of our payments were just being done through checks or wires or ACHs,” says Gregg Wiston, SVP Finance and Accounting for Margaritaville at Sea. For significant recurring expenses like Facebook ads, it meant that they had to pay down their credit line every few days to ensure that the next payment would go through.

Mesh, with its focus on saving companies time and money, was just the solution the overworked finance team was looking for as it scaled up after Covid. After seeing the Mesh platform in action, easy-to-provision virtual and physical cards, budget approval tools, and automatic reconciliation of expenses, the team was impressed.

“The value of using a modern expense management platform instead of a traditional corporate card was a game-changer for us,” Gregg Wiston, SVP Finance and Accounting for Margaritaville at Sea.

After a quick and painless onboarding, Margaritaville at Sea got instant relief with their mission-critical recurring payments under control. It’s given them the freedom to expand automatic payments to other expenses and strategic spend. Now, they’re using Mesh for expenses ranging from IT vendors and gift shop vendors to marketing subscriptions.

“I love how easy it is to quickly set up a subscription,” Gregg says. “And then that card is just for that. We don’t even need anyone to tell us what it’s for. It’s Starlink, it’s Facebook. We know exactly what it is when [a charge] comes through.”

Margaritaville at Sea also uses Mesh to make payments and track their travel expenses for both corporate and crew travel.

“We have a whole department whose job is buying plane tickets for our crew coming back and forth,” Gregg explains. “So that’s a huge one.”

There are also smaller travel charges incurred when corporate employees need to travel between offices or to the ship.Whether it’s for corporate employees traveling between offices or crew members flying between ports, Mesh allows the team to easily pay for travel expenses and submit receipts.

As a result, month-end close is a lot less painful — and the platform is much more user-friendly.

“Receipts are painlessly uploaded and we can see them right away,” says Accounting Manager Maria Benero. “Now we know what each charge is for as it happens, so we can quote it to the right account and track expenses in real-time.”

She estimates it saves them multiple hours every month, while Gregg adds that they can now close the month in two or three days.
Needless to say, they don’t miss chasing employees and executives for receipts.

“Mesh automatically requests receipts from everyone who hasn’t submitted them yet,” Gregg says. “They get on them. It’s easy.”