Alchemy saves up to 3 days per month on closing the books with Brex.
The TL;DR
Alchemy tried to control spend with disparate systems, corporate cards, and invoicing platforms.
Their disconnected solutions resulted in excessive manual work, poor visibility into spend, and unreliable data.
Alchemy chose Brex to unburden the accounting team, close the books faster, and unlock real-time insights for greater cost efficiencies.
The Impact
2-3 days
Saved on the monthly close process
500+ hours
Saved by employees per month
Company
Alchemy is a web3 developer platform that enables companies to build scalable and reliable decentralized applications without the need to manage blockchain infrastructure in-house. Alchemy is based in the US and has more than 250 employees.
Challenge
Previously, Alchemy was using several disparate systems for spend management. The company was using Bill.com for invoicing, had bank-issued corporate cards through Bank of America, and ran reimbursements through its payroll provider — none of which were interoperable.
While one system was connected to the HRIS because it was processing payroll, the other two were not, so Alchemy didn't have corporate cards that could be governed by an issuance-and-approval workflow. As a result, the company suffered from excessive manual work, unreliable data, long month-end close cycles, and low visibility of its spending.
“Having a unified approach to all of [our spend] has helped bring everything together, and it's really streamlined the process.”
— Sean Soper, Head of Accounting and Financial Operations at Alchemy
Solution
Alchemy consolidated all of its spend onto the unified Brex platform — including physical cards, virtual cards, reimbursements, bills, and ACH and wires — giving them total visibility and control across all of their company spending.
One primary reason for making the switch to Brex was scalability. Alchemy wanted a solution that they would use for years and that would grow alongside them. “Brex’s ability to spin up infinite virtual cards and have governance upfront, programmatic controls that then lend to more rigorous control environments down the line — those were key considerations for us,” says Sean Soper, Head of Accounting and Financial Operations at Alchemy.
“Brex is basically saving us 2 to 3 days on the financial close process monthly.”
— Sean Soper, Head of Accounting and Financial Operations at Alchemy
Impact
Alchemy chose Brex for a unified approach to spend management, which unlocked up-to-the-minute insights into spend. This has allowed them to drive greater business impact and cost efficiencies globally by adopting a system that enables them to keep teams on budget and reallocate resources in real time.
As a company based on blockchain technology, Alchemy knows better than anyone that enacting regulation by enforcement is the less efficient, less secure way to administer spending rules. Because Brex enables them to take a proactive approach with compliance-focused automation, such as embedded policies, automatically generated receipts, OCR field fills, and general ledger synchronization, Alchemy has been able to unburden the accounting team and close the books in real time with less manual work.
“Brex is basically saving us 2 to 3 days on the financial close process monthly,” Sean says. “And that’s attributed to getting real-time insight into overarching spend. Once all the coding and the expenses are matched up, they go through the accounting module, which then goes through another level of review before we push it into our ERP software. So, it really helped us streamline the process.”
Furthermore, automatic receipt generation has accelerated reimbursements by as many as two hours per employee, per month. “It's a huge difference between reimbursements the way it was done previously through our payroll processor,” Sean adds. “In fact, there was no mobile app for that particular reimbursement setup, so just the fact that Brex has a mobile app has definitely improved the user experience for our company.”
“By consolidating expenses, we can optimize our spending, make more informed decisions on the fly, and improve our bottom line.”
— Sean Soper, Head of Accounting and Financial Operations at Alchemy
Ultimately, Sean believes that the benefits of unifying Alchemy’s spend have implications far beyond any single feature or perk. “Overall, it gives us a competitive edge,” he concludes. “Having a unified approach to all of [our spend] has helped bring everything together, and it's really streamlined the process. By consolidating expenses, we can optimize our spending, make more informed decisions on the fly, and improve our bottom line.”