ADVERTORIAL FEATURE
Event planners know all too well the challenges around planning, sourcing and managing the perfect event. Everything starts with receiving budgets and obtaining approvals. Once the event is approved, the planner must simultaneously manage the attendees, venue, speakers, and vendors – from transportation and lodging to entertainment and audio/visual – while ensuring all is within budget.
This multifaceted process is fraught with pain points, not least of which includes making timely payments to secure services, reconciling transactions, and allocating expenses correctly. The good news is: it doesn’t have to be hard. That’s because Citi and Cvent have teamed up to embed payment control and oversight into Cvent’s meetings and event management solution that caters to a planner’s every need.
Ensuring every expense adheres to budget Cvent’s solution helps overcome the challenges of setting budgets and tracking spend - eliminating the difficulties of tracing funds, calculating costs and overseeing surpluses in one integrated process. Part of the ingenuity comes down to integrating Citi’s virtual card accounts into Cvent’s pre-approval workflow, which supports a host of budget and transaction controls to help planners manage expenses from the get-go.
The combined platform also makes it easy to set permissions for budget and spend approvers by planner, virtual card account or meeting. And by having the ability to make payments directly through the platform, event planners always have an accurate view of how they are tracking to budget, which allows them to more effectively manage the total event. Even large event programmes are a breeze, as the permission-based system supports multiple users at the same time.
Simplifying vendor payments In addition to helping planners manage all of the attendee, scheduling and on-site details, the combined platform addresses another need – finding and sourcing the right venue. Once the right vendors have been located, tools on Cvent’s platform make it easy to create and send electronic requests for purchase to multiple suppliers, who can then respond to the offers.
And thanks to the direct payment integration with Citi, once pricing has been agreed to, payments – whether deposits or in full – can be done directly from within the tool, ensuring all pertinent spend information is always at the planner’s fingertips. Planners can now easily compare actual spend against agreed budgets and aggregate spend by vendor to help with future negotiations.
Transacting with supreme efficiency When all’s said and done, the innovation with Citi and Cvent’s joint solution lies in its seamlessness. Planners can now transact with the utmost
efficiency, easily paying a deposit or guarantee, or settling an amount in full, by generating a virtual card account or using a lodged card account within the platform.
Embedding Citi’s payments into Cvent’s events and meetings management solution offers a myriad of benefits: planners can gain better visibility over all purchases made to date, automate the reconciliation of purchase transactions, and accurately report on performance against budgets at every stage of the planning process. Planners also save valuable time using the solution, as everything they need is stored, tracked and organised within the seamlessly integrated platform. This frees up the planners’ time to focus on what they do best: planning events to drive their business forward.
You can put the power of this market-leading solution to work for your next meeting, event or conference too. Simply email us at
cvent@citi.com today to learn more.
Citi
© 2017 Citibank, N.A. All rights reserved. Citi and Citi Arc Design are trademarks and service marks of Citigroup Inc., or its affiliates and are used and registered throughout the world.
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