Key Takeaways
K2 Cranes digitised service-engineer expenses with CashBook UPI wallets
K2 Cranes, a leading EOT and industrial crane manufacturer, delivers installation, commissioning, and AMC service through engineers travelling to client factories across India and the Gulf.
Funding that field workforce with cash advances and TA/DA claims left finance with no real-time visibility, slow reconciliation, and spend that was hard to attribute to a site or service call.
CashBook UPI wallets gave each service engineer a centrally funded wallet to pay fuel, travel, lodging, and local vendors directly by UPI.
Every transaction now appears live in one dashboard, tagged to an engineer, vendor, amount, and timestamp, making field spend fully visible, controlled, and auditable.
The result is faster book closure, no more month-end TA/DA paper chase, instant mid-trip top-ups, and an expense system that scales with the after-sales network.
About Company
K2 Cranes & Components
K2 Cranes & Components builds and services the heavy lifting equipment that keeps India’s biggest factories running. Under the promise of World Class Cranes with Top Class Support, the company designs, manufactures, installs, and maintains EOT and industrial cranes for Toyota, Volvo, Tata, L&T, Godrej, Daimler, GE, Caterpillar, Saint-Gobain, and other manufacturers across India and the Gulf. For a capital-equipment manufacturer, the sale is only the beginning. Cranes must be installed, commissioned, and serviced for years under warranty and annual maintenance contracts. Service engineers travel to customer factory floors across states, spending on fuel, travel, food, lodging, and on-site consumables to complete installations and close breakdown calls. K2 Cranes retired cash advances and slow travel-allowance claims, rebuilding service-engineer expense management on CashBook UPI wallets so head office can watch, control, and reconcile field spend as it happens.
Challenges
The hidden cost of after-sales service across a national network
For an OEM whose equipment is installed and maintained at the customer’s location, the biggest operational spend often happens far from the finance desk. K2 Cranes’ engineers constantly travel to commission new cranes and service existing ones under AMC at plants across the country. Every visit creates small, urgent, unavoidable payments: diesel at a highway pump, a bus or train ticket to the next town, a night’s lodging, a meal, and purchases of consumables or spares from local vendors. Together, these payments make up a meaningful share of the true cost of after-sales service and are notoriously hard to manage. Traditionally, head office issued a cash advance or engineers spent from their own pockets before filing travel and daily allowance claims. Cash advances were difficult to attribute to a site visit and easy to lose track of. Reimbursement claims piled up, took weeks to settle, and physical bills reached accounts long after the money had been spent.
Service engineers needed ready funds for fuel, travel, lodging, and on-site consumables, while cash advances were hard to track and control.
Finance had no real-time view of who spent what, at which site, and on which service call until bills came back days later.
Settling TA/DA and reimbursement claims was slow, manual, and error-prone at month-end.
Advances and site floats were difficult to attribute to a job and easy to leak.
There was no clean way to set per-engineer spend limits or top staff up instantly mid-trip.
The deeper problem was visibility. When field spend happens in cash, finance is always looking backwards. There was no way to know, during the week, how much had been spent by which engineer, on which service call, and on what. Controls were just as blunt: limits were difficult to set, engineers could not be topped up instantly mid-trip, and leaks remained hidden. As K2 Cranes won more clients and its installed base grew, the service visits, small transactions, and reconciliation backlog grew with it. Finance managed paper instead of money, while engineers lost billable time arranging cash instead of fixing cranes. K2 Cranes needed to put spending power in the field while keeping control at the centre.
Solutions
One wallet per service engineer, full visibility for head office
K2 Cranes moved field spend onto CashBook UPI wallets, a model built for businesses whose people spend away from the office. Instead of handing out cash advances, the company issues each service engineer a UPI-enabled wallet, funds it centrally, and lets engineers pay vendors directly from a phone while every transaction flows back into a single finance dashboard. Head office loads money into individual wallets whenever a service visit demands it. A technician heading out to commission a crane or answer a breakdown call no longer waits for an advance or fronts personal money. Funds sit ready on the wallet, and engineers pay by UPI for fuel, tickets, lodging, and local spares suppliers.
A dedicated UPI wallet for each service engineer, funded centrally from a single company account.
Direct UPI payments to any vendor for fuel, travel, lodging, and local spares suppliers.
Instant central top-ups, so no engineer stalls mid-visit for want of funds.
A live transaction feed logging every spend with engineer, amount, running balance, vendor, and timestamp.
KYC-verified users, turning ad-hoc cash advances and TA/DA claims into a governed, auditable field-expense system.
Every payment appears in the CashBook dashboard as it happens, tagged with the person who spent it, amount, running wallet balance, vendor, status, and timestamp. Finance can follow spend across every site and service call from one screen, even with engineers scattered across states. Because wallets are funded centrally, K2 Cranes decides how much sits on each wallet and tops it up instantly when an engineer runs short mid-trip, without anyone touching cash. KYC-verified users keep every wallet tied to a verified identity, creating a governed and auditable field-expense system that gives engineers freedom to move quickly and finance the control it never had with cash advances.
Impact
From chasing TA/DA claims to watching spend in real time
The biggest change for K2 Cranes was shifting from looking backwards to looking at the present. With cash advances and reimbursement claims, finance only learned what an engineer had spent long after a service visit ended. With CashBook UPI wallets, spending is visible the moment it happens and already attributed to a specific engineer and vendor. The month-end scramble to collect, decode, and key in TA/DA bills becomes a running record that is always current. Because every transaction is captured with context as it occurs, little remains to reconcile after the fact. Finance closes books faster, spends less time on data entry, and has a complete audit trail across every engineer and service call whenever it is needed.
Real-time visibility of all field spend, attributed to each engineer and vendor as it happens.
Automatic, near-continuous reconciliation instead of a month-end TA/DA paper chase.
Central control of funds with instant mid-trip top-ups, replacing cash advances and floats.
A faster finance close and a complete, always-ready audit trail per service call.
A field-expense system that scales cleanly with every new site, contract, and hire.
The field team benefits too. Engineers stop fronting money from their own pockets and waiting weeks on TA/DA settlements. They arrive on site with funds ready, spend more billable time servicing cranes, and less time arranging cash. As K2 Cranes takes on more clients and more equipment to maintain, adding an engineer means issuing a wallet instead of opening another stream of untracked cash. The field-service expense model holds up as the after-sales network grows instead of buckling under it. The work in the field speeds up while control at the centre gets stronger.
Industry Application
Which industries benefit most from CashBook UPI wallets
K2 Cranes is a manufacturer, but the problem it solved belongs to a much wider group: any business whose people spend away from the office across many locations hits the same wall with cash advances and reimbursement claims. CashBook UPI wallets are built for that shape of operation. These industries feel the field-spend challenge most and gain the most from putting it on wallets.
Manufacturing and heavy engineering: plant and project teams handling on-site procurement, consumables, and staff spend across multiple units and cities.
Industrial machinery and equipment OEMs: service engineers installing, commissioning, and maintaining machines under AMC on customer premises.
Construction and infrastructure: site engineers paying suppliers, labour, and incidentals across dispersed project sites.
Logistics and fleet: drivers and route managers covering fuel, tolls, lodging, and repairs on the move, with spend tracked per trip.
Solar and renewable EPC: installation and O&M crews spending across scattered rooftops and ground-mount sites.
Facility management and field services: distributed teams servicing many client locations daily, from HVAC and elevators to inspection and maintenance.
Whether spend happens at a delivery hub, rooftop array, or factory floor, the challenge is identical: give each engineer, site, or outlet a funded UPI wallet, let them pay directly, and keep every transaction visible and reconciled at the centre. K2 Cranes did not have to slow down its service engineers or add heavy process to bring field spend under control. By moving from cash advances and TA/DA claims to CashBook UPI wallets, it gave engineers the freedom to pay for fuel, travel, lodging, and on-site needs as jobs demanded it, while giving head office a live, attributable view of every rupee spent. If your business runs on people and payments spread across many locations, you do not have to choose between field-team freedom and finance-team control. With CashBook UPI wallets, you get both. Book a demo now.
