The new year has brought us many new queries from organisations asking how to set up vHelp. This is great because its shows that organisations are taking the current climate into consideration and focusing on reimbursing their volunteers’ expenses quickly.
First of all, if you want to see how vHelp works please don’t hesitate to send us an email at hello@vhelp.co.uk to schedule a half an hour demo. Our demos have no obligations at all, we treat all organisations the same regardless of their size. We also understand that if you are part of a large organisation, you will not be making a decision quickly and there may be several demos to follow, so don’t worry there is no pressure.
So, you are a charity and want to know how to start using vHelp to pay volunteers’ expenses? Here are three simple steps.
Register Your Organisation With vHelp
What do you need? The organisation’s payment card
The person registering your organisation with vHelp needs to have access to the organisation’s payment card - let’s call this person the Main Admin. The payment card can be a debit, credit or even a pre-paid card. This is to enable vHelp to charge it and reimburse the volunteers’ expense. If you have the card to hand, the registration process doesn’t take more than 10 minutes.
Questions we get asked:
Do you charge vHelp’s fees to this card?
No, we don’t. We only use this card to charge your organisation the value of the approved expenses at the end of the day. Let’s say you approved 5 expenses at £10 each, at the end of that day we will charge you £50 and distribute this money amongst the relevant volunteers.
For vHelp’s fees, we invoice organisations at the end of the month and expect payment via bank transfer.
Is there a set-up fee?
No, there isn’t. vHelp is Software As A Service, its available easily on the web for organisations to sign up and start using it straight away, therefore there is no need for a setup fee.
Invite Your Volunteer Managers
Once the Main Admin registers your organisation, they can easily send email invites to their colleagues such as volunteer managers and finance admins. The Volunteer Managers can help approve volunteers’ expenses. The finance Admins will have access to volunteer expense reporting, by setting up filters and downloading CSV files.
Large organisations using our vHelp Teams product, can also set up different teams within your organisation and assign different volunteer managers to those teams.
Invite your volunteers to Claim Expenses
Once you’ve registered the organisation and you have your volunteer managers set up you can start inviting your volunteers to join vHelp. Volunteer registration takes a few minutes, and the volunteer can make an expense claim immediately.
There are a few ways to invite your volunteers to register with vHelp:
- Invite volunteers individually using their email
- Mass invite by sending the volunteers a link via email to register with vHelp
- You can share your organisation code with volunteers and ask your volunteers to go to vHelp.co.uk and register. The organisation code helps us link the right volunteer to your organisation.
Again, large organisations using vHelp Teams can invite volunteers to the different teams set up (in the previous step) and can move volunteers easily between teams.
We also provide organisations with an information leaflet to share with their volunteers to inform them about the collaboration with vHelp and give them basic instructions on how to claim expenses.
These are the main steps that you need to get started with vHelp whether you are a small team or a large organisation with thousands of volunteers.
People often ask how long it takes to get vHelp set up.
As detailed in the steps above, the service is there and ready for use so it all depends on how quickly you can get your team and volunteers engaged and ready to go. We’ve had organisations set up and had their first claim in a couple of days and some others may take a bit longer.
vHelp provides excellent support over the phone, email and chat. We provide support to both organisations setting up and volunteers claiming expenses ensuring no one gets stuck in the process.
If you have any questions that we didn’t answer in this post, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on hello@vhelp.co.uk
vHelp is the fastest, most efficient, and secure way to reimburse your volunteers’ expenses