COWI Field Notes: expense management and communication in the field

Business context

COWI is a global consulting company running thousands of projects in parallel, with a large number of employees working in the field. The scale of operations and geographical dispersion required a tool that would streamline the collection and reporting of travel expenses and support ongoing internal communication in a simple, effective way.

In 2018, the goal of the collaboration was to demonstrate the feasibility of building an intuitive application that would ease the workload of field teams, accelerate expense settlement and provide consistent access to company information. The key requirement was to combine financial and operational functions in one user-friendly mobile solution.

Challenge

The main challenge was to design an application that would simultaneously enable precise collection of business expense data, efficient management of meeting rooms across individual locations and real-time delivery of company news from the internal intranet.

The solution had to be convenient for field users, minimise errors, support rapid rollout at scale and integrate with the existing information infrastructure (including SharePoint), while maintaining high usability and reliability.

Solution

The Leaware team developed the COWI Field Notes mobile application — easy to install and use, with an interface designed for day-to-day field work. The application enables quick registration of travel costs, scanning and sending receipts directly to the company portal, and automatic generation of daily expense reports, giving the organisation continuous visibility into costs.

The tool also combines meeting room management across individual locations with access to intranet news (SharePoint), together with notifications about new publications. This gives employees a consistent, up-to-date context regardless of where they work.

Following the release, the application was enhanced through code changes and fixes that eliminated errors, along with a refreshed interface layout. This improved the solution’s stability and usability, resulting in a smoother reporting process.