Here at vHelp, we are all about making reimbursements easier. Whether you are a volunteer yourself, a business owner or volunteer manager looking to pay people who aren’t on your automated payroll, we can help. Reimbursing volunteer expenses never looked so quick and easy! In this article, we will be looking at who can use vHelp, as well as some examples of how various organisations are utilising our services now.
Who Is vHelp?
It only makes sense to tell the story of how our amazing team started vHelp before explaining who can use our services and benefit from them.
In 2020, my co-founder and I were running a business which enabled children to pay safely online. This business took off quickly, even winning multiple awards as it gained more and more traction. Unfortunately, in March, the dreaded pandemic hit which put a hold on our venture. Our business was great but it was a ‘nice to have service’ and at a time when the entire world is unsure of what the future holds, we all parked the ‘nice to haves’.
We decided to just focus on going out and helping the community, so we started shopping for our neighbours. We quickly found that getting reimbursed for the shopping was an awkward situation. We looked into how volunteer’s are reimbursed and found that across the board, this process was outdated and filled with problems.
So we built vHelp, an app to help charities reimburse volunteers expenses quickly, easily and efficiently.
As we explored the third sector, we found that no organisation had an easy way to reimburse their volunteers - we were surprised as we’ve claimed expenses in our jobs since the noughties so why are charities still reimbursing volunteers manually?
Our research found that most charities struggled with reimbursing their volunteers simply because they are not on their payroll system and therefore there was no other alternative but to process their requests for reimbursement manually.
It turned out that there are many systems to reimburse those who are on your payroll but none when it comes to reimbursing people who are not on your payroll hence why all these charities were processing payments in this outdated way. Let’s face it, creating a payment system is no simple task so no one has built a bespoke system either.
So, vHelp was founded during the pandemic and focused on reimbursing volunteers expenses, however we quickly found that there are many more applications for vHelp.
Medical Research Organisations Reimbursing Research Participants
A few months ago a medical research organisation got in touch with our team and asked about the possibility of using vHelp to reimburse medical research participants expenses. After some research of our own, we found that most organisations are still using cheques to pay for these expenses. Sometimes they send over a 1000 cheques a month to reimburse those research participants. If you think of the stamps cost alone that’s more than £800, let alone the time spent processing the claims and writing those cheques! Even when they moved to bank transfers, the time taken to process each individual payment was holding them back. This also meant that the research participants were not getting their expenses reimbursed for several weeks.
vHelp is now working with a medical research organisation helping them reimburse their research participants expenses. We are also in talks with medical research organisations who compensate research participants for their time and working on enabling this type of payment through vHelp.
Market Research Organisations Reimbursing Research Participants
In addition to vHelp being beneficial for medical research organisations and volunteers, we are also working with market researchers who up to now use vouchers to compensate their research participants.
From our conversations with market research organisations, we have found that participants for these studies prefer to be paid in cash, claiming that money-in-hand improves engagement. However, there is no easy way to give people money directly. This is where vHelp can be proved extremely useful, as it allows you to pay multiple people with just the click of a couple of buttons, saving you both the time and hassle of reimbursing your research participants
What About Guest speakers?
Recently, I, the co-founder of vHelp, was invited to a prestigious university in England to deliver a guest lecture about building a Fintech startup. The university offered to pay me for speaking to the students and I was interested to see how they would get the funds across to me. I was informed that they would have to add me to their payroll in order to pay me. If the university was using a tool such as vHelp, they wouldn’t need to add me to their payroll system for this one-off activity, which would save them both time and money. I, as the guest speaker, could simply make a claim for my time and any other expenses I feel should be reimbursed and by using the app or website, pay me back within a matter of seconds.
Who Can Use vHelp?
As a business, you can reimburse anyone who delivers an adhoc service to you and who is not on your payroll, from your guest speaker to your office cleaner. Through getting them to claim using vHelp you can pay them within 24 hours and reduce your payment processing admin time by 88%! If you want to discuss how you can use vHelp for your business, get in touch with one of the team now by emailing us at hello@vhelp.co.uk or giving us a quick call at the number 020 7117 2097.