Key Takeaways
Center-level spending does not fit treasury workflows. Urban Vault fits out and runs managed offices across Bengaluru, Pune, and Gurugram. Fit-out procurement for new centers and daily facility spend at live ones created a constant stream of mid-ticket payments that a single administrator could not route fast enough.
Spending authority moved to the ground, control stayed central. Project and facility teams now hold wallets with set limits, so they can pay vendors the moment a site needs it, while finance keeps oversight, caps, and a live view of every rupee.
One payment rail covers every vendor. From furniture suppliers and hardware vendors to florists, IT providers, and logistics partners, every payee accepts UPI, so CashBook fit existing vendor relationships without a single change.
Just-in-time funding replaced idle buffers. Instead of parking large balances "just in case," Urban Vault tops up wallets on a regular schedule, moving capital into teams precisely when center execution demands it.
Every payment is self-documenting. Merchant details are captured automatically at the moment of payment, giving finance center-level and project-level cost attribution and GST-ready records without chasing receipts.
About Company
Urban Vault is a managed office space and coworking brand founded in 2018 by Amal Mishra and Piyush Kumar, headquartered in HSR Layout, one of Bengaluru's busiest commercial micro-markets. The company designs, fits out, and operates premium managed offices for startups, scaleups, and established enterprises, with a client roster that has included names like Licious, Zetwerk, PVR, and DealShare.
What began as a Bengaluru operator has grown into a multi-city business, expanding across Pune and Gurugram with a large committed investment in new capacity. Crucially, Urban Vault is not only a space operator: it runs a dedicated fit-out and facility management business that designs and builds out office interiors and then keeps them running, a vertically integrated model where the company controls everything from the build to the daily upkeep of each center.
That model creates a very specific expense problem. Setting up a new center means a burst of procurement, furniture, hardware, décor, electrical, and finishing works, often across several sites at once and against tight handover timelines. Running live centers means continuous facility spend, pantry supplies, repairs, consumables, and logistics, repeated across every location. Teams in three cities make small-to-mid-ticket payments many times a day, the kind of distributed spending that makes expense management software essential for multi-location operators. The spending is unavoidable. The real question is whether finance can see it as it happens.
Challenges
How do managed office operators manage spending across multiple centers?
The default system for a multi-center operator looks a lot like petty cash scaled up: a central treasury releases funds, a single administrator processes transfers, and project or facility staff spend against whatever they have been given, with reconciliation happening later. When the controlled funds run short, or a vendor needs paying immediately on site, staff pay from their own UPI and claim it back. For one center this is manageable. Across simultaneous fit-outs and live operations in three cities, it breaks down.
For Urban Vault, the spending was constant and time-sensitive. A fit-out cannot wait for a furniture or hardware payment to clear an approval queue, and a live center cannot wait on a pantry or repair vendor. Yet every payment request funneled through manual treasury transfers handled by one administrator, creating a bottleneck precisely where speed mattered most. Vendor payments slipped, project managers lost time chasing fund releases, and the finance team spent its days firefighting payment requests instead of managing cost.
The deeper problem was visibility. Dozens of vendor UPI payments went out with no categorization, so there was no way to know in real time what a given center or fit-out had actually spent. Purchases were not linked to projects, vendor records were not consistently GST-compliant, and month end meant reconstructing each center's spending from scattered receipts and memory. The result was the worst combination for a finance team: real money moving fast, with records arriving slow.
Fit-out and facility payments bottlenecked behind a single administrator doing manual transfers
Project teams lost execution time waiting on fund releases for time-sensitive vendor payments
Dozens of uncategorized UPI payments left no real-time view of center or project-level cost
Purchases were not linked to projects and vendor records were not consistently GST-ready
Finance reconstructed each center's spending from receipts weeks after the money had moved
Each issue is small on its own. Multiplied across simultaneous fit-outs, live centers, and three cities, they compound into cash leakage risk, delayed vendor payments, and project cost tracking that always lags reality.
Solutions
How Urban Vault runs center spending on CashBook
Urban Vault rethought its virtual account: instead of a place to hold idle funds, it became a dynamic pass-through rail. The company moved to CashBook's UPI for business expenses platform, where a master wallet is loaded centrally, finance distributes funds to individual team wallets with defined limits, and team members pay vendors directly by UPI, exactly as before, but now from company money under company control.
Project and facility staff now hold CashBook employee wallets with balances and limits set by finance, so each role has precisely the spending power it needs and no more. Smart caps, on the amount per wallet, the number of transactions per wallet, and the number of transactions per beneficiary, prevent overspending and enforce compliance without a human gatekeeper. Nobody fronts personal money, and nobody holds loose cash. Every vendor Urban Vault already paid accepted UPI, so CashBook slotted in without changing a single vendor relationship. The payment method changed; the workflow did not.
Funding became deliberate rather than reactive. Instead of parking large buffer balances, Urban Vault tops up wallets on a regular schedule, every ten to twelve days, keeping cash flow to the ground smooth and predictable while reducing idle capital. When a center needs extra capacity for a fit-out push or a launch, finance tops up a wallet in seconds from the dashboard rather than running a cash advance and refill cycle. And every payment captures the vendor name and merchant details automatically, landing in the ledger the instant it happens, so the same dashboard gives finance company-wide employee expense tracking and real center-level cost visibility for the first time.
Issued company-funded UPI wallets with role-based limits to project and facility teams
Set smart caps on amount, transaction count, and per-beneficiary spend to enforce compliance automatically
Moved furniture, hardware, décor, IT, and logistics payments to company UPI without changing any vendor
Replaced single-administrator manual transfers with instant, scheduled wallet top-ups from a dashboard
Captured vendor and merchant details on every payment for project and center-level attribution
The core tension in project-based operations is between governance and agility. CashBook resolved it by separating the two: finance keeps oversight, limits, and a live ledger, while teams on the ground get the autonomy to make time-sensitive procurement decisions without bureaucratic delay. CashBook became the single source of truth for operational spend across every center.
Impact
Within months of going live, Urban Vault's treasury function shifted from a reactive bottleneck into a proactive enabler. Vendor payments that once required multiple approval steps and manual transfers now happen instantly, strengthening supplier relationships and giving the company more room to negotiate. Project managers make timely procurement calls without fear of cash shortages or release delays, and the finance team spends its time on cost optimization across the portfolio instead of chasing receipts.
Team members stopped lending the company money. Fit-out and facility purchases are paid from company wallets, which means no reimbursement claims to file and no waiting weeks for personal money to come back. Month-end closing no longer starts with a pile of paper either: every transaction already carries its payee, amount, time, and documentation, so finance reviews and exports instead of investigating, and vendor records stay GST-ready, protecting input credit that undocumented cash spending forfeits.
Control improved as much as speed. With fixed wallet limits, smart caps, and every rupee leaving through a recorded UPI transaction against a named payee, the gaps where petty cash leakage hides, inflated bills, undocumented withdrawals, ad-hoc cash, simply do not exist. And with spending tagged by wallet and category, finance can put fit-out and facility costs from different centers side by side, spot the one that spends differently, and ask why while the month is still running.
Complete expense transparency across hundreds of transactions with vendor names and center-level categorization
Zero out-of-pocket spending and zero reimbursement claims for project and facility teams
Just-in-time funding moved money to wallets only when needed, reducing idle cash
GST-ready digital records protect input credit that cash spending forfeited
Month-end reconciliation became a review of complete records instead of a reconstruction
The most important outcome is structural. Finance moved from reconstructing the past to reviewing the present, and the same wallet infrastructure that runs today's centers will absorb higher transaction volumes as Urban Vault adds locations, scaling spend control without scaling administrative overhead.
Industry Application
How CashBook helps managed office and real estate operators control spending
Office fit-out and interiors teams.
Pay furniture, hardware, décor, and finishing vendors on site by UPI, with project-level attribution and receipts attached at payment.
Facility management companies.
Replace cash floats and reimbursement cycles behind most petty cash management problems with recorded, capped UPI payments per site.
Multi-location real estate operators.
Distribute spending authority to site managers while keeping centralized oversight, the same way Urban Vault runs three cities from one dashboard.
Managed office and coworking operators.
Give every center a wallet with limits and see fit-out, facility, and pantry spend across all locations in one ledger.
Property and hospitality operators.
See how Moustache Escapes and Spacez manage property-level spending, and how Hopcharge handles field payments with the same wallet structure.
Urban Vault built its business on controlling every step from build-out to daily operations of a managed office. CashBook extends that control to the money that keeps each center running: the furniture order during a fit-out, the repair vendor at a live site, the logistics booking moving supplies across town. Spending that used to bottleneck behind one administrator and surface weeks later now flows instantly through capped wallets and lives in one real-time ledger across every city the brand operates in.
For project-based businesses in managed workspaces, interiors, and facilities, this is what modern UPI wallet infrastructure makes possible: centralized control and operational agility at the same time, a foundation for scalable growth without proportional administrative overhead.
Book a demo to see how the same multi-center expense management setup used by Urban Vault can work for your offices, fit-out projects, or facilities, or write to us at support@cashbook.in.
