Fuller’s

Fuller, Smith & Turner (Fuller’s) is one of the UK’s best-known pub and hotel businesses. After selling its Chiswick brewery in 2018, the company now focuses on hospitality, running around 185 managed sites, with around half in London and the south, and the rest in the Midlands. It employs around 5,000 people.  

Senior Auditor at Fuller’s, Abi Conlon, leads a team of three auditors responsible for oversight and assurance on the retail side of the business. “We work closely with our pub teams and their operational leaders to make sure that processes are followed,” she says. “We have to have the right visibility over spend and reduce risk across the estate – but without making it hard for our pub teams to run their pubs day to day. Soldo is a really important part of that.” 

The challenge 

Before 2020, Fuller’s was a cash-heavy business – pubs always need small, everyday items at short notice and there was always cash on hand to cover them. When Fuller’s reopened its doors after COVID-19, it did so without cash in the business. However, the need for those quick, ad hoc purchases remained.  

The second issue was transparency. With three auditors covering 185 sites, some pubs would only see an auditor once a year. “We didn’t have any realistic way to have real-time oversight over cash spend.” 

Fuller’s needed a way for every pub to spend when it needed to – without losing visibility or control. 

The solution 

Fuller’s assigned individual Soldo cards to pubs, not people.  

Each site has a card, and authorised users within that pub can use it. Cards are organised into groups with an operational manager overseeing each one. As every pub is different, each one has a bespoke spending limit and its own set of users. The setup covers both small day-to-day purchases and higher recurring costs. 

But card payments couldn’t cover everyone or everything. Musicians, window cleaners and one-off suppliers needed to be paid directly by bank transfer. 

As a temporary fix, Fuller’s tried alternative payment systems, such as PayPal, but found them unreliable. “We would be able to use it for a few weeks, then they would freeze the account,” says Abi. “Managers would also change. It’s hard to change names on PayPal accounts.” 

This is where the partnership with Soldo made a difference. Abi shared the problem at a Soldo user group, which helped shape a new product: delegated bank transfers.  

Rather than transfers from the main company wallet – which would give more than 185 employees access to Fuller’s Soldo funds – transfers come out of each pub’s individual wallet. The manager of each site requests a payment and their group leader authorises it. The payment is processed. “It’s fabulous and works wonderfully well for us,” says Abi. 

The impact 

Monthly cash payments across the estate have dropped from £40,000–£50,000 to around £2,000. “It has entirely solved our problem,” says Abi. 

For a small audit team, the change in coverage has been transformative. Every transaction across all 185 sites can be checked monthly and remotely, without visiting the site. Missing receipts and incorrect coding are flagged immediately rather than waiting for an annual audit. 

Control is also flexible. If a site has an unusual upcoming purchase, limits can be changed instantly. “All of our pub managers would say that they absolutely love that,” says Abi. 

Larger payments now run through an operational authorisation flow, eliminating much of the risk. And crucially, the people running the pubs are on board with the system too. 

“I never hear a bad word about Soldo. They think it’s fabulous. The people who work in our pubs and hotels are doers – they want to get on, solve their problems, pay their bills and move on. We’ve given them the tool to do that.” 

Payments are almost instant and ad hoc suppliers that could never be set up centrally – because the process was too lengthy – can now be paid directly, with built-in controls. 

The conclusion 

Fuller’s has turned a cash-heavy, hard-to-audit operation into one where every payment – card or bank transfer – flows through a single controlled process, visible to the audit team as it happens. 

Fuller’s has been a Soldo customer since 2021. For Abi, the biggest lesson has been to treat Soldo as more than a software service. “Treat this as a partnership. It’s not just a card or a payment tool. For us, the value has come from collaborating with Soldo. We have not had to put a square peg in a round hole – we have a system that works for us.” 

The collaboration – from user group feedback to a bespoke solution 18 months later – is what turned a product that solved part of the problem into one that solved all of it. 

Looking ahead, Fuller’s plans to make greater use of Soldo data to support procurement, strengthen compliance and spot purchase patterns to understand what’s being bought outside company policy and why, tightening controls without creating friction. 

“Soldo has brought us so much more scrutiny and visibility of our spend. We can only keep building on that.”