How globally-distributed organizations can manage finances efficiently and put people first

Work now happens everywhere — at headquarters, in satellite offices, in employee’s homes and even on the go.

As organizations focus on improving enterprise mobility and supporting a globally-distributed workforce, they also need to ensure their systems can keep up. But when it comes to spend management, this still isn’t the case. Many companies often spend far too much time manually entering data into spreadsheets, chasing receipts, and clarifying confusing expense policies.

In today’s digital-first world, the ancient ways of doing business are no longer enough. To increase their agility, companies must adopt automated, holistic solutions for both their finance teams and employees. Brex Empower helps forward-thinking organizations move with speed, strengthen trust, embrace a culture of financial discipline, and put their people first. Here’s how this solution enables companies to solve three of the most pressing spend management challenges they face today.

Many enterprises have turned to automation to optimize expense management. However, many of these siloed, standalone spend solutions only solve for part of the problem and don’t communicate with other financial tools. More than half of organizations use disparate tools and processes to manage business spending. It may be simple for employees to submit expense reports, for example, but approvals and expense reimbursements take several weeks because financial decision-makers lack the visibility they need.

The solution: A unified, intelligent spend management tool.

Modern organizations can no longer afford siloed expense management processes. They need a solution purpose-built with automation and integration in mind, one that lets them manage their spend in one place.

Brex Empower integrates corporate card and spend management into one platform, so finance teams don’t have to reconcile data and cobble together a budget from disparate tools. Organizations can issue a Brex card to employees, easily track their global spend and import and share with other internal systems, including their ERP. Whether it’s procurement, stipends, or one-off events, finance teams can easily define travel and expense (T&E) and procurement policies, create custom spend rules, and set limits in local currency for different spend categories, such as flights, hotels, and meals.

Finance decision-makers also say managing multiple payment methods in different countries is one of their biggest pain points. Brex’s platform addresses this challenge by enabling finance teams to reconcile expenses and issue reimbursements in local currency, so employees can receive payments quickly, regardless of their location. All these capabilities create a frictionless experience for every business user within the modern enterprise.

Globally-distributed teams are now the norm, but companies often struggle to define their expense policies in a way that meets the needs of various groups within their organizations. The result? Unclear expense policies that aren’t easy for employees to follow, a greater risk of non-compliance, and more inefficiencies for finance teams.

The solution: Present expense policies in a user-friendly, digestible format.

Employees need clarity and context to stay compliant. (Finance teams also realize this: 91 percent say process simplification is a top priority for improving their payment and expense processes.) So it’s necessary to create a culture of compliance, with products that make it easy for employees to do the right thing.

Brex Empower is built for an employee-first experience. It simplifies spend management in several ways: The solution takes traditional text-based expense policies and transforms them into powerful visuals, and provides business context in real-time when employees book travel or perform another spend activity.

Compliance is embedded into the platform, with built-in controls and automated capabilities that keep organizations in budget. Finance teams can establish specific policies for different departments, teams or employees and the system will automatically approve or deny requests in line with these policies. Employees also can view policies via a dashboard or mobile app, so they can understand in real-time whether a specific expense is allowed.

Maintaining compliance isn’t only complex, it’s also expensive: Audit and compliance activities account for between 11 to 23 percent of the cost of a T&E program. Brex Empower’s automated, built-in governance and user-friendly information design helps businesses manage their global spend more efficiently and potentially reduce costs. It also eliminates confusion and ensures employees don’t run afoul of expense policies in the first place — driving better compliance and reducing organizations’ financial risks.

The traditional approach to spend management has involved centralization and control, businesses need to empower employees to make it easy to make the right spend decisions — while having a mechanism to keep them accountable.

The solution: Empower employees with the information they need, when they need it.

Capturing business spend should be flexible and seamless, regardless of whether an employee works on site, at home or constantly travels. Businesses also need access to real-time analytics to improve their financial resilience and performance.

Brex offers omnichannel expense capture, including receipt collection via text, mobile apps, Slack, WhatsApp and other third-party solutions, pre-approved budgets that enable employees to spend smarter, and end-to-end visibility for finance teams. The solution also provides data-driven insights that empower businesses to make more informed decisions about how to reduce costs, and in turn, effectively redeploy their capital.

Several companies have taken advantage of Brex to improve spend management. One media agency has used Brex’s automated receipt matching capabilities and ability to whitelist vendor companies to automate expense approvals that its previous corporate card usually rejected, increasing the speed at which its business now operates. A biotechnology company has used Brex to streamline expense management and automate receipt collection as its business scaled, freeing its team to devote more time to research and other core business activities.

Every company now needs to move at the speed of its customers. The only way to accomplish this is to transform from the inside out. Brex Empower allows companies to gain more insight into their financial operations and adopt a modern, people-first approach to spend management that drives their business globally.