5 accounting automation benefits every accountant needs to know

How much impact could your finance team have if they weren’t chasing expense receipts or manually coding GL transactions? And what if it wasn’t an all-out sprint to close the books at the end of every month, quarter, and year?

Accounting automation saves finance teams countless hours of work preparing, reviewing, and exporting expenses. And while automation immediately relieves accountants of tedious data entry and review, it delivers even more downstream value.

Automating manual accounting workflows increases accuracy, enabling finance teams to:

As a trusted leader in spend management, Brex makes it easy to achieve these accounting automation benefits and more. Here’s how finance leaders, controllers, accounting managers, and AP directors at top companies use Brex to automate accounting and save up to 250 hours a year.*

* The metrics provided are from July 2023 and for illustrative purposes only. Past performance does not guarantee future results, which may vary.

Closing the books is a resource-intensive process that’s heavily dependent on the expense process. Employees typically have to submit expenses and then accountants review and reconcile those expenses. Brex’s AI-powered spend platform automates the expense process on the front end with auto-generated receipts, memos, and approvals, and streamlines the accounting on the back end with auto-categorization, GL mapping, and seamless ERP integration.

These automations improve compliance, reduce errors, and help Brex customers regain huge swaths of time and effort every month.

“Brex can reduce our month-end close effort in a more compliant way, and also help FP&A administer the budgets in real time a lot better, instead of weeks after the fact in the month-end close process,” said Teddy Collins, Vice President of Corporate Finance at SeatGeek. “Auto-categorizing transactions makes a big difference, and we have everything we need to close the books.”

Triage Staffing halved their expense management workload using Brex automations. “Previously, I spent 25 to 30 hours per month all in with managing our card platform,” said Natalie Dircks, Senior Accountant at Triage. “I'd say that it's down to easily 15 hours or less with Brex.”

Property management company Avenue One also saw big gains closing out card transactions, reducing their monthly close by days.“Previously we would spend days doing the close for credit cards alone. That was a super manual and inefficient process,” said Katherine Spillane, Assistant Controller at Avenue One. “On top of that, everything would have to go through review, which takes even more time. With Brex, our month-end close takes just one click.”

Sean Soper, Head of Accounting and Financial Operations at Web3 developer Alchemy, echoed that time savings. He says Brex’s compliance-focused automation gave back his accountants half a week every month. “Brex is basically saving us 2 to 3 days on the financial close process monthly,” Sean said.

SeatGeek found that automating cumbersome documentation work could dramatically reduce its accounting overhead. Teddy, the Vice President of Corporate Finance, says they 10x-ed their speed in transaction reviews, all while pushing compliance to record levels.

“Our accounting team was really drowning in manual processes,” he said. “Previously, our accounting close was around 22 hours working through 15 different department corporate cards — trying to figure out who spent what, realizing ‘oh, that person doesn't work here anymore,’ and tracking down all the receipts. With Brex, that documentation piece is down to 2-3 hours, all while achieving an employee compliance rate above 99%. We then completed the month-end close activities in about 15 minutes, which was really exciting.”

Teddy adds: “I'm confident we'll be able to reduce the accounting overhead related to expense management for credit cards by about 95%.”

The benefits of automation in accounting extend beyond the book-closing process. Empire Portfolio Group was able to use that accounting data to optimize costs for its Orangetheory Fitness studios and raise the bar on financial efficiency.

“Because we’re able to see spending at such a granular level, we’re now able to benchmark our studio locations against one another and truly understand the cost of running the most efficient [Orangetheory Fitness] studio,” said Tiffany Miller, Director of Accounts Payable, Empire Portfolio Group. “We’ve seen a huge shift in accounts payable from being a back-office data entry function to a powerhouse of information.”

The accounting automation benefits for Avenue One include increased data accuracy, which unlocks new analysis opportunities to help drive company-wide decision-making.

“From an FP&A standpoint, Brex helps us analyze our spend, track trends, surface insights, and help the management team make better decisions,” said Katherine Spillane, Assistant Controller at Avenue One. “If they’re debating whether to attend a conference this year, we can easily pull up last year’s data to show how much we spent versus how much business we brought in.

All businesses spend money, but accounting and finance teams are left to reconcile those expenses and make the numbers work. Signifyd Accounting Manager Ty Barton appreciates that the Brex platform is designed to bring more visibility into that spend with less work, freeing up accountants to be more strategic partners to the business.

“Brex budgets keep everyone accountable while giving us real-time visibility into all spend,” Ty said. “And the finance team can still get as granular as they want, because every transaction is automatically mapped to the right GL code for the right department.

He added: “Brex … checks all the boxes, from reliable corporate cards to time-saving automations that make our accountants’ lives so much better. We saw Brex as the only future-proof solution that could take us to the next level. As we continue to expand globally, we know that Brex will play a key role in our growth.”

In a recent Forrester survey, 69% of global financial decision-makers say managing global spend is a top challenge. They cited the inability to track taxes and fees, unify and access financial information, and enable compliance with local regulations as key factors.

Global insurance carrier Lemonade improved accounting tax compliance across their multi-entity operations thanks to Brex’s embedded policies in local currencies and intelligent receipt capture. Lemonade can now ensure policy and tax compliance specific to each entity's local regulations, avoiding excessive FX fees, unnecessary money movement around their global bank accounts, and intercompany accounting transactions.

“Before Brex, we had to download all transactions, map them based on a spreadsheet by cost center or ledger account, review the data, and then load it in via a journal template,” explains Mike Duffy, Director, Assistant Controller at Lemonade. “Then we’d review the journal for accuracy and completion. It’s now a very smooth process with Brex.”

Brex uses AI-powered automation to process transactions, expedite reconciliation, and identify irregularities so accounting teams can focus on delivering insights and analysis. Discover the benefits of accounting automation with Brex and free up time for your finance teams to drive new business growth.