Key Takeaways
1. Company-Funded UPI Wallets for Planners
CashBook UPI wallets let wedding planners use company-funded wallets for urgent expenses instead of using their personal funds and waiting for reimbursements.
2. Live Budget Tracking During Weddings
Real-time dashboard let finance team see expenses during events and control budgets before weddings went over budget.
3. Bills Captured Right After Payment
Planners upload receipts immediately after every payment, so no bills get lost or forgotten.
4. Month-End Work Cut from Days to Hours
Event categorisation and sync with accounting tools like Zoho Books and Tally made reconciliation fast instead of chasing coordinators across cities.
5. Better Profits from 1,000+ Weddings
Complete digital records reduced undocumented spending and showed true costs for each event across different cities.
About Company
About The Wedding Company
The Wedding Company is a modern, full-stack wedding planning and fulfillment platform. It manages end-to-end weddings across venues, decor, photography, catering, makeup, mehendi, DJ, and logistics, acting as a single execution partner for families who want high-quality, well-managed events without handling dozens of vendors themselves. The team runs multiple weddings in parallel across cities, with coordinators and vendors working on tight timelines and high client expectations.
Business Model & Operations:
Service Offering: Full-stack wedding planning covering venue booking, decor, photography, catering, makeup, mehendi, DJ services, and logistics coordination
Operations Scale: Managing over 1,000 weddings across eight major Indian cities with over Rs 30 crore in service orders processed
Growth Momentum:
Target Market: India's aspirational middle-class segment seeking quality-conscious, transparent wedding services without excessive costs
Every wedding involves hundreds of time-sensitive decisions: last-minute decor additions, emergency print jobs, backup vendors, props, logistics changes, and online orders for items needed the same day. These constant, on the go spends make weddings operationally complex and financially hard to control if employee expenses are managed with physical cash and manual tracking.
Challenges
Before CashBook, The Wedding Company relied heavily on petty cash and reimbursements. Cash was distributed to planners before events, and when that ran out, employees used their personal UPI or cash to pay for urgent requirements. Bills were often collected in a hurry, stored in bags or pockets, or forgotten completely. Expense details lived across WhatsApp chats, notes apps, screenshots, and memory.
This created three big problems. First, employees spent regularly out of pocket for business expenses, and staff reimbursement management took time and effort to process. Second, finance teams had almost no real-time view of what each event was actually spending until long after it ended. Third, month-end expense reconciliation meant chasing people for bills, matching screenshots to events, and trying to plug gaps where documentation was missing.
The Wedding Company's operations were built for speed, but its expense systems were stuck in the past. Events demanded quick decisions and instant payments, while cash-based processes moved slowly and left gaps. Event managers started their day with cash envelopes and ended it with crumpled bills and half-remembered spending. When petty cash ran out mid-event, the only immediate option was using personal money. Even prepaid cards don't work well for these micro transactions. Only UPI gives planners the ability to make instant payments to any vendor on the ground.
Finance teams sitting at the office could not see what was being spent while weddings were actually happening. Month-end became a stressful, multi-day exercise of chasing coordinators for missing receipts, reconciling multiple versions of the same expense, and absorbing small undocumented spends as leakage. The system was workable at a small scale, but not for a fast-growing company handling many events across different locations.
Solutions
The Wedding Company adopted CashBook to move all day-to-day operational spends from cash and personal UPI to company-controlled UPI wallets. These wallets became the default way to pay for everything required on ground: local suppliers, last-minute props, printer shops, fuel, logistics, and even urgent online orders.
CashBook turned scattered, manual expense handling into a structured, real-time system for distributed teams. Instead of stuffing cash into envelopes, the company topped up digital wallets. Instead of asking team members to remember who spent what, CashBook recorded every rupee as it was paid. Each coordinator walked into an event with a pre-funded UPI wallet, ready for anything the day would throw at them. When an unplanned requirement appeared, a decor change, an extra vehicle, a missing prop, the planner could pay instantly from the wallet and attach the bill on the spot. Finance teams watched spending unfold through a live dashboard, with every transaction linked to an event and a user. This ensured expense policies were enforced without slowing people down and created a single source of truth for all operational expenses.
Every transaction made through these wallets automatically generated a digital trail for better employee expense tracking. Immediately after paying, staff attached a photo of the bill or a screenshot of the online invoice to that specific expense. Wallet limits and rules ensured no one could overspend or use funds outside policy. On the finance side, a central dashboard showed event-wise and employee-wise spends in real time. Expenses were tagged to specific weddings, and at the end of each event or month, finance could export clean, structured data directly into accounting tools for seamless expense reconciliation.
With CashBook, employee expense management moved from being an afterthought to becoming part of the natural flow of event execution. Planners no longer had to choose between getting things done and keeping clean records. The system preserved the speed and flexibility that weddings demand while embedding control, documentation, and structure under the hood.
Impact
After rollout, the difference was visible both on ground and in the finance function. Events ran smoother because distributed teams no longer paused for cash or waited for approvals for small spends. Planners stopped using their own money. Every purchase now has a digital record linked to the right wedding.
CashBook transformed how The Wedding Company manages wedding expenses. Planners now get instant funds without carrying cash envelopes. Finance teams see exactly what each wedding costs and close books fast. The old messy reimbursement process became simple digital tracking.
For finance, live visibility replaced guesswork through real-time employee expense tracking. They could see which weddings were trending over or under budget while they were still in progress, not weeks later. Expense reconciliation, which earlier dragged on for days, shrank to a review exercise because the data was already tagged and documented. Small, previously invisible leakages, cash that never got fully accounted for, bills that were never submitted, dropped sharply.
Most importantly, there was a clear shift in employee sentiment. Coordinators no longer worried about reimbursement delays or bearing losses when a bill went missing. The process felt fair and predictable. As the company continued to expand to more cities and bigger weddings, CashBook gave leadership confidence that employee expense management workflows would scale along with demand.
Industry Application
The problems The Wedding Company solved with CashBook are common across the wider event and experience ecosystem. Any business that runs projects on ground, with distributed teams and constant micro-spends, faces the same mix of petty cash headaches, personal fund usage, and reconciliation chaos.
Segments that benefit from UPI for business expenses include:
For all of these, wallet-based digital employee expense management infrastructure provides the same core advantages: instant spending capacity without cash, clean documentation without extra effort, and centralized visibility without slowing the people doing the work.
Conclusion
The Wedding Company's story shows how modern UPI for business expenses infrastructure can unlock better weddings and a stronger business at the same time. By moving to CashBook's employee UPI wallets and structured employee expense tracking, they removed the friction of cash, protected employees from financial stress through better staff reimbursement management, and gave finance the real-time clarity needed to scale confidently. Any event-driven organization with distributed teams facing similar challenges can follow the same path to turn expenses from a daily struggle into a quiet, reliable system that just works.
If you're in the events business or manage weddings, book a demo today and see how UPI wallets can eliminate petty cash hassles for your team.
