Founded by Talia Mashiach in 2010, Eved is an event commerce company that has created a marketplace and a collaborative platform for events. The Eved platform, called EvedSource is a complete supplier relationship management solution for the events industry and the marketplace (aptly named, “EvedMarketplace”) serves as a place for event managers, marketers, and planners to source new suppliers.
The Eved platform and marketplace help to address a number of challenges that meeting planners and event managers face in their supply chains. From on-demand supplier information to integration with internal programs, the Eved platform is designed to “bridge the gap between everyone involved in your event.”
Data is necessary to manage and make strategic decisions which is why it’s one of the most important parts of a successful meeting and events program. Unfortunately, event planners often don’t have a lot of data to utilize in their decisions. Eved sees payments as a source of data. Whoever owns the payment process; owns the data.
In the past, payments processing has worked mainly in one of two ways: the traditional ERP/PO system or the credit card or meeting card system. The traditional ERP/PO system is valuable in managing processes and maintaining compliance, however it lacks flexibility. The cards provide greater flexibility but their use often results in a loss of control of data and processes. However, when you wrap software and payments together (as Eved has), you can create an automated payment processing solution that takes the best of ERP/PO systems and the best of the card systems and marries them in a way that is able to deliver data to event planners while maintaining compliance.
A planner’s greatest task is to stay within budget. So the typical planner will have an excel file where they track money spend and try to compare it to budget so they don’t go over. Later they have to go back, determine when the supplier was paid, how much was paid, etc. Ultimately, it winds up being a lot of manual work to ensure that they’re not exceeding budget.
However, when you bring that whole manual process into an automated platform then it’s all automatically updated so any reconciliation takes place as invoices are received and payments are made.
With Eved, suppliers can create their invoices in the platform which allows for all the line items to be built in. This results in the capture of data relating to quantities, items, categories, etc. Payments are made from this centralized system as well thus allowing for real-time tracking, the elimination of reconciliation, and a greater granularity of spend.
This is an incredible proposition because usually, even with the data of what’s been spent, a planner might still have to wait a few weeks to understand the spend against the budget. When invoices are being captured and payments are being made on a singular platform, then event planners can get real-time data, not just post event data. You can arrange to pay a venue and in real-time know what the venue is charging against an invoice or a PO.
Some other use Exa
mples:
- You could go in and quickly understand the average price of ground transportation in a particular city or even for a particular hotel.
- If you’re purchasing or sourcing something and getting quotes back, you can benchmark what the price was throughout the previous 12 months so you can know if what you’re about to buy is higher or lower.
- A category manager can review the data to determine where money could be saved and greater efficiency can be reached.
With an automated platform, all the time that was previously spent manually updating and tracking spend money and all the nervousness about going over budget goes away, allowing your team to focus their energy on being experience builders and on improving the quality and impact of their events.
Learn more about Eved on their website.
Kaylynne Hatch
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