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About Cove: Transforming real estate into hassle-free homes across Southeast Asia
Founded in 2018 through Antler’s first inception residency, Cove has rapidly become one of Southeast Asia's leading flexible living providers. Following the acquisition of Casa Mia Coliving in 2025, Cove manages over 2,000 rooms in Singapore and more than 8,000 rooms in the Asia Pacific, offering young professionals and students move-in-ready accommodation with flexible contracts and all-inclusive pricing covering furniture, utilities, Wi-Fi, and housekeeping.
With an annualised gross rental value of over USD $50M and operations spanning Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, and Korea, Cove combines property acquisition expertise with operational efficiency to deliver hassle-free living experiences.
The Challenge: Managing property-level finances at scale without operational chaos
As Cove expanded from 250 to over 2,000 rooms across multiple countries, their finance operations faced mounting pressure. Managing thousands of monthly rental payments, utility bills, supplier invoices, and employee expenses across hundreds of properties required financial infrastructure that could scale without bloating the team.
#1 Manual invoice processing created bottlenecks and lost expenses
Before Aspire, Cove's accounts payable process relied heavily on email-based invoice collection and manual data entry into their accounting system. Suppliers would send invoices to an AP inbox, finance staff would manually upload them into Xero, and then initiate separate bank transfers for payment.
This multi-step workflow was time-consuming and error-prone. Invoices could get lost in email threads, leading to missed payments and strained supplier relationships. Even when invoices arrived on time, manual data entry introduced delays and the risk of accounting errors.
#2 No visibility into property-level spending
For Cove, granular financial management is essential for understanding which properties are profitable and where costs need to be controlled. Their previous spend management solution couldn't support property-level tracking. Expenses could only be monitored at the department level, making it difficult to assign costs accurately to specific properties. This lack of granularity meant Cove couldn't effectively control spending at the property level or give property managers autonomy over their budgets.
#3 Slow reimbursement processes left employees out-of-pocket
Their previous solution's multi-step approval process created unnecessary delays. Even after managers approved expenses, the finance team had to manually process payments, adding days or weeks to the reimbursement timeline.
Often, employees had to wait until the end of the month to be reimbursed for company expenses they'd incurred out-of-pocket. For a growing team managing properties across multiple countries, these delays created unnecessary administrative friction.
The Solution: Aspire's budgeting, automated AP workflows, and instant disbursements
Aspire's platform delivered on three critical fronts: streamlined bill payments, property-level financial controls, and automated expense management.
#1 Consolidated bill processing with OCR automation
Aspire's bills functionality streamlined Cove's accounts payable process. Suppliers can now send invoices directly to a dedicated email address, where Aspire's OCR technology automatically extracts key details like supplier name, amount, and date.
Users simply review the pre-populated information, add property-specific details through Xero tracking categories, and submit for approval, all in one platform. By eliminating manual data entry and consolidating invoice processing and payment in a single platform, Aspire dramatically reduced processing time and virtually eliminated lost invoices. More importantly, it freed Cove's lean finance team to focus on strategic work rather than administrative tasks.
#2 Property-level budgets with virtual cards for granular cost control
With numerous properties, Cove created individual budgets for each property and issued virtual cards tied to those budgets. This setup gave property managers direct control over operational expenses like utilities, local suppliers, and repairs, all while maintaining strict budget parameters and real-time visibility.
Aspire’s native integration with Xero's tracking categories ensures every transaction is automatically tagged to the correct property, feeding directly into individual property P&Ls without manual intervention. This granular visibility transformed how Cove manages costs.
#3 Instant expense reimbursements without finance team intervention
Aspire's automated expense approval and disbursement workflow eliminated the bottlenecks that left Cove employees waiting for reimbursements. Once manager approval workflows were configured in Aspire, approved expenses now trigger immediate payment transfers to employees' bank accounts, with no intervention required from the finance team.
Staff no longer front company expenses for weeks waiting for month-end reimbursement cycles. This has improved cash flow for employees and reduced administrative burden on the finance team.
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