When Small Business BC (SBBC) was selected as a delivery partner for British Columbia’s $300 million Business Recovery Grant to help businesses cope in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, they had to quickly ramp up the systems required to fulfill their role in the vital program. SBBC was tasked with identifying, vetting and engaging a roster of over a thousand professional service providers, matching them with eligible businesses, and ensuring recovery plans were completed in a timely manner.
One of the key deliverables for SBBC was to receive, review, approve and pay invoices from the professional service providers on behalf of the BC government. This meant disbursing millions of dollars to thousands of providers in a short timeframe. Since SBBC did not have the resources, processes, or controls required to manage these disbursements, a manual solution or temporary labour was simply not an option. They needed a technology solution that was easily deployed, with the highest level of controls and security to be able to process these payments quickly – without taking on risk.
“That’s where SparcPay came in, and was the ideal solution for us” said Joshua Ludgate, Vice President of Operations for SBBC. “The deployment was quick, the service providers were able to easily self-enroll, and the processing and monitoring was quite seamless. In a very short timeframe, we disbursed millions of dollars to over a thousand providers quickly and accurately, without a single technical issue. The technology proved to be invaluable in this program. That’s why we will be relying on SparcPay again for future projects.”