How Brex customers are driving compliance while saving 4,250 hours a year.

Brex customers save their employees and managers up to 4,000 a year by automating documentation and reviews.

Between clunky expense report processes and the endless expense review and approval cycle, compliance work can be awfully time-consuming. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Before Brex, social enterprise Human-I-T had at least one full-time employee solely dedicated to expense document management and manual data entry. Now, with Brex to automatically generate and reconcile receipts, their accounting team is moving faster than ever with a greater focus on strategic initiatives.

The managers at biotech startup Medicinal Genomics used to review every single expense that came across their desk. “Those hours should have been spent on value-added activities with direct top and bottom line impact,” said Arlene Barbieri, Corporate Financial Controller at Medicinal Genomics.

Then, they switched to Brex. Now, with automated expense reviews powered by AI and customized approval workflows, managers only have to review by exception, saving hours of unnecessary approvals.

“We’ve drastically reduced the amount of time we spend on card and finance management,” Arlene said. “And we’ve streamlined our management processes across the board.”

T&E policy enforcement can be extra burdensome for global business like Incode, an identity company with offices in San Francisco, Belgrade, and Mexico City. Under their old travel portal, employees would have to meticulously comb through the company’s expense policy before booking accommodations.

“Our policy required travel bookings to be made five days in advance, but that wasn’t clear with our old travel portal,” said Juan Miguel Salazar Muñoz, Controlling Analyst at Incode.

Now, with Brex’s intelligent travel booking suggestions and easy-to-follow policy view, Incode employees can book compliant travel with a few clicks.

“Our employees have the guidance they need to make the purchases they need while staying on budget,” Juan explained. “Plus, Brex travel gives our employees easy access to great options and rates, and our policies are auto-enforced, so it's easy for them to book the air and hotel they want while staying in policy.”

Those time savings really add up, and they translate into serious cash savings for Brex customers.

Brex customers save their employees and managers up to 4,000 hours a year, which translates to $250,000 in payroll savings (using a baseline of $120,000 annual salary).

The time saved with Brex’s powerful automations can directly translate into cost-savings, as Human-I-T EVP Aaron Wilkins explained.

“The efficiency gains made with Brex open up new opportunities for strategy and career growth,” said Aaron. “Brex allows our employees to grow [in their roles] and learn how to use these solutions without adding three to five additional people to our team to support larger volumes of transactions.”

The finance team at Superhuman once tried to control spend with multiple standalone tools, including Ramp stipends, bank-issued corporate cards, Expensify software, and bill.com. The approach wasn’t efficient or scalable, making it difficult to keep every team on budget. Now, with Brex, Superhuman has eased its manual workload, gained greater control over spend, and restored the finance team’s capacity to focus on high-impact work.“Brex enables us to focus on maximizing our runway and being cost-efficient, said Superhuman Head of Finance Andrew Maher. “Brex is our critical finance tech stack and allows us to do more with the resources we have. We can make better decisions about where we should be spending and steer the company in the right direction.”

Brex budgets have also improved the user experience at Superhuman. Today, each employee saves “four hours a month on expense reporting” while managers have regained “10 hours a week” as Brex streamlines approvals. Instead of tedious compliance work, employees are able to focus on the job they were hired to do, yielding a significantly stronger employee engagement ROI.

Brex customers following our recommendations and best practices can achieve up to 99% employee compliance. * The 99% compliance rate takes into account a cohort of our top customers that follow our best-in-practice guidelines and recommendations.

Compliance is a struggle for companies using traditional expense solutions. Outdated platforms require employees to comb through sprawling expense policies, attach receipts, and fill out memos.

When employees spend outside of compliance, it’s often unintentional and due to a lack of policy awareness. But, when financial products deliver a great employee experience, it’s easy for employees to do the right thing.

Heirloom, a fast-growing direct air capture company, used to have their employees spend on a Chase corporate card and submit reimbursement requests via Zoho. Now, they’re delighting employees with Brex’s seamless expense reporting process and driving a near-perfect compliance rate.

“I personally love how easy it is to close out expenses by Slack or text,” said Candice Chow-Gamboa, Chief of Staff at Heirloom. “We’ve seen the employee compliance rate skyrocket to 96% percent with Brex.”

Bobby Flay’s cat food brand, Made by Nacho, has achieved a 98% compliance rate since switching to Brex. “The Brex app drives compliance by letting employees upload receipts in seconds,” Senior VP of Finance Yasmin Siddiqui explained. And, with embedded policies built into every unique budget, they’re “eliminating tedious expense reports,” automating compliance across their entire org.

Finance leaders are charged with ensuring responsible spend across the entire org, even as the vast majority of spend decisions happen outside of their office. Employees and managers are tasked with keeping all spend in policy and on budget — on top of their core, revenue-generating responsibilities. And, despite their lofty promises, disparate financial tools only lead to greater inefficiencies.

But with Brex’s complete AI-powered platform, companies are automating compliance, closing the books faster, and keeping everyone on budget in real time. The result? They are saving $18 million in total per year by blocking out-of-policy spend and 300,000 hours in total per year through accounting and expense automation.

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