Controllers Council recently held a webcast panel discussion on How Leading Companies Gain Control Over Their Spend, sponsored by Brex.
Brex is the first fully unified global spend platform with corporate cards, expense management, reimbursements, bill pay, procurement and travel all in one place. Brex makes it easy for finance teams to manage every aspect of global spend at scale by empowering employees anywhere to make better financial decisions. Brex proudly serves tens of thousands of businesses from enterprises to startups.
The panel was moderated by Thomas Piani, Senior Director of Product at Brex. Panelists included Natalie Dircks, Senior Accountant at Triage Staffing Healthcare; Rafael Tihanyi, Senior Director Operations at Graphite, and Bryan Medina, Accounting Manager at Inter Miami, the MLS soccer club.
Following are key takeaways to this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full webinar archive video here.
How do companies proactively manage their spend today?
Natalie: As Triage grew, our volume of corporate travel spend certainly grew with it. And Brex has as you know, the budgeting capability for divvying out allotted spend by department and limiting spend based on need and being able within budgets and that function, you’re able to create what what’s appropriate for your team.
Rafael: one of the things that we’ve taken the most advantages of is the ability to create nested budgets and virtual credit cards.
Bryan: besides travel and expense tracks and just the flexibility provides. And to Miami itself as a sports club, it’s needs on a daily basis are very dynamic and versatile.
What are some of the tactics and some of the functionality that you’ve seen have impact that you’ve used to improve employee compliance and manager compliance as well?
Natalie: Recently, over the past few months, Triage did roll out more robust, T&E policy and cardholder policy. So that certainly had an impact. But I think that even more importantly is that there are tools within Brex that help us to monitor and implement those parameters.
Bryan: For compliance, just the ease of it. That would be the number one thing I would say. Now, no employee, no matter age, position in the department, nothing can tell us that they don’t have a laptop. And I don’t have to panic to get the computer. If you have a phone and you have the internet and you can download this app or you can just log into the website, you can take two minutes to just drop a picture or you can do whatever you need to do. Because in the past, understand that prior server, credit server had issues and made the process to stay compliant, very meticulous, and difficult. In a very fast-paced environment, that’s not something where you want to slow down in.
Rafael: The fact that we as a full remote tech company, we’re very reliant on Slack and the fact that whenever there’s a new expense, anyone, everyone gets a message through the bot reminding them.
What is the future of spend management technology?
Rafael: I would say first and foremost, just increased visibility. Just the fact that in our specific case, we were able to move from, we have several credit cards going around, they’re not directly connected to our bank account, so every month we wait for the statement and then we look at all the expenses and we tried to match what is what to just being able to basically live, be able to see how are we spending money. I think that’s the future of the industry, being able to just every day review expenses and if I wanted, I could right now just go and see what are the expenses that we’ve had today, review them, talk to the person that did them, see if it was relevant or not, if there were any issues.
I think the other thing is flexibility. With Brex, it is incredibly simple. I go on the platform, I increase the budget, I can increase it for a one-off expense, or I can increase it just for perpetuity depending on what that’s coming from. And I think that’s also a game changer. The fact that you can just easily do things on the platform, play around. Decrease, increase budgets and the ability to just have a really native and friendly user experience.
Natalie: When I think about the future of spend management and our past couple of years and our experience here at Triage, I think of how the data availability within the Brex environment is so much less siloed than we used to have it between each process. But as I see Brex growing in its product portfolio that offers solutions within one login, that’s very key for many people. They just want a one stop shop or one place to go.
Bryan: For spend management, I would say the biggest key point for spend management is feeling confident that the information we’re getting is complete and accurate. So that way I truly know that the information and the spending I’m managing is correct.
To view the complete webcast, download full webinar here.
ABOUT THE SPONSOR:
Brex is the first fully unified global spend platform with corporate cards, expense management, reimbursements, bill pay, procurement and travel all in one place. Brex makes it easy for finance teams to manage every aspect of global spend at scale by empowering employees anywhere to make better financial decisions. Brex proudly serves tens of thousands of businesses from enterprises to startups.
