3 ways KeepCup is enhancing visibility across finance and operations

Finding it harder to see clearly across finance as your business grows? Here's what KeepCup is doing for greater visibility of its global multi-entity operations.

By ApprovalMax

August 26, 2025

Many growing businesses start out with great visibility because their team and operations are small enough that they can get the information they need without extra tools or steps. But as a business grows, this gets harder and harder – and the lack of clarity creates real problems.

You might find yourself chasing down invoices that got missed in someone’s email or scrambling to figure out your cash position when bills are due tomorrow. Simple questions, like “What do we owe this month?” become time-consuming and hard to answer when you're operating across multiple locations, with different business streams or added complexity like new entities or 3PL.

All of this makes it feel like you’re flying blind. Instead of informing strategic decisions with real-time data, they’re more of a best-guess. However, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Seeing clearly across growing global operations

This is exactly what KeepCup, an Australian sustainable retailer, experienced. KeepCup was developed as the solution to a big waste problem – disposable coffee cups.

Inspired to address this environmental problem, which causes 60,000kg of plastic waste every year, Abigail Forsyth founded KeepCup in 2009. The business designed and manufactured the world’s first reusable coffee cup and has since grown to operate across Australia, the UK and USA. KeepCup has sold more than 8 million cups to customers from more than 65 countries, diverting billions of disposable coffee cups from landfill.

Prior to Covid-19, KeepCup had a steadily growing business and didn’t notice any gaps in visibility. However, this changed during the pandemic as consumer behaviours moved away from sustainability. The business shifted to becoming more of a lifestyle brand and broadened its product range to include reusable travel bowls and camp mugs, as well as selling more online.

This is where gaps started to appear, says Abigail Forsyth, Co-Founder and CEO of KeepCup. “We were so stable for such a long time and had a very limited product range so it was easier to make decisions off pretty loose data.”

“But as your supply chain and range becomes more complex, you can't see it as clearly,” she says. “You need to be able to drill into the data a lot more.”

In November 2024, KeepCup began building a new tech stack to streamline financial operations and get a clearer view across the business. Here are three ways the team is using technology to enhance visibility:

1. Insight into AP, every step of the way

Errors and issues kept slipping through the cracks without the right systems and processes in place. Incoming bills were meant to go through an email-based approval process, but sometimes this would get skipped and operations wouldn’t have visibility over what was quoted vs what was paid.

“We'd overpay for certain things or were misinvoiced and there was no cross-checking happening,” says Alex Andreou, Finance and Operations Manager at KeepCup. “Our team is very busy and the last thing they think about is paying bills. We might get an email at 11.30pm saying ‘this needs to be paid by tomorrow’.”

Since moving to ApprovalMax, including Capture, and Xero, the accuracy and visibility has increased. “We’re not missing invoices or double entering them – that’s the biggest change. It’s all there in ApprovalMax,” says Andreou.

The business has a lot of moving pieces; 1,000 pieces of a SKU might get ordered first, then later revised to only 700. Sometimes, a PO or bill won’t reflect this change – but now the team no longer has to dig through countless emails if there’s an issue with an invoice. It’s all reflected in ApprovalMax as a single source that’s easy to find and refer back to, for everyone involved.

2. Seeing cash flow clearly

Across the board, cash flow is a top concern for many businesses. Most businesses surveyed by Xero globally had experienced cash flow issues in the past year, ranging from 72% of small businesses in the UK, to 87% in Australia. Managing cash flow is critical to healthy business operations and visibility plays a key role.

Technology has been central to enhancing KeepCup’s visibility of cash flow, with big impacts for the overall health of the business. Now that each and every incoming invoice goes through the right steps before it goes into the system, the KeepCup team has a more accurate view of spend and cash flow.

The team has greater visibility over upcoming invoices that need to be paid since everything flows into ApprovalMax and Xero, rather than being surprised with last-minute bills. This allows them to plan and budget with more accuracy.

“With ApprovalMax and Xero, we can see what we owe and when we owe it,” says Andreou. “Being able to easily see what we’ve got in the bank and what we’re going to pay makes a huge difference.”

3. Smarter decision-making

Given the complexity of KeepCup’s operations, it’s critical to have the right data and insights to make strategic business decisions.

KeepCup’s new tech stack, which gives a comprehensive view of the business’ financials across multinational, multi-entity operations, gives the team the up-to-date data they need to make informed choices.

“The visibility from moving to Xero is fantastic,” says Forsyth. “It means better decisions and confidence in those decisions.”

“You’re not flying blind and having a guess. Instead, you’re looking at data to inform these choices and building a better forecasting ability.”

Having the right financial systems makes all the difference when your business starts to outgrow manual processes. Investing in the right tools and setting up streamlined processes gives you the visibility you need to move from putting out fires to making confident decisions based on real-time data.

Want to see how ApprovalMax enhances visibility across accounts payable for yourself? Sign up for a free trial.

Approvalmax is an all-in-one B2B software platform used by businesses around the world to build robust AP and AR automation, creating multiple layers of internal control. It streamlines the approval process by allowing users to create automated workflows to approve bills and invoices. ApprovalMax integrates with accounting platforms such as Xero, QuickBooks Online, and Oracle NetSuite to unlock powerful efficiencies for accounts payable and accounts receivable functions in any finance team.