Superhuman gains visibility and control with Brex’s total spend platform.
The TL;DR
Superhuman tried to control spend with disparate corporate cards, systems, and invoicing platforms.
Those solutions led to poor visibility and org-wide inefficiencies.
With Brex, Superhuman is spending more efficiently and maximizing their runway.
The Impact
500+ hours
Saved by employees on expense reporting per month
40 hours
Saved by managers per month via automated approvals
100%
Employee adoption rate
Company
Founded in 2015, Superhuman is an innovative software company that has rebuilt the inbox from the ground up to help companies and consumers get through their email twice as fast. They have 130 employees working in a remote-first model in the US and globally.
Challenge
Superhuman was using multiple standalone financial tools, including Ramp stipends, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) corporate cards, Expensify software, and bill.com. The finance team had to log into multiple dashboards to review spending, and each product had to be manually synced with their GL. This approach was time-consuming and not scalable.
Superhuman wanted a single, holistic financial stack that would deliver real-time visibility, insights, and control — and drive high adoption with a user-friendly experience.
“Brex is both a really flexible budgeting and card provisioning management tool and our expense report tool. It’s a clean setup.”
— Andrew Maher, Head of Finance, Superhuman
Solution
Choosing Brex as their streamlined, all-in-one provider was a “no-brainer” according to Andrew Maher, Head of Finance at Superhuman. “Brex is both a really flexible budgeting and card provisioning management tool and our expense report tool. It’s a clean setup.”
To start, Superhuman issued a Brex card and food stipend budget to each employee. The stipend budget gives employees a preset spending limit that renews monthly and has an auto-enforced policy that restricts purchases to food at approved vendors. Proving that food is the best motivator, Andrew noted — “We achieved 100% adoption easily.”
Rollout was incredibly smooth, thanks to the intuitive user experience. “There were very few questions, if any. Everyone was just humming along,” remarked Andrew. Employees loved the five-star Brex mobile app too. “The ability to seamlessly toggle from physical to virtual cards is so nice,” said Andrew.
Impact
Now with one process for all types of spend — from vendor-specific budgets to department budgets to employee stipends — Superhuman is easily keeping all teams on budget every month. Admins find Brex easy to use, and they’re comfortable putting all spend into budgets because of the flexibility, limits, and auto-enforced controls.
“The ah-ha moment for me as a finance leader was — I can put everything in Brex. Everything can be controlled by a budget. If spending is approaching limits in one area, I know in real time and can talk to leaders about possible tradeoffs.”
— Andrew Maher, Head of Finance, Superhuman
“We set up one-time budgets for certain activities and vendors, and quarterly budgets for departments such as marketing that are aligned with our FP&A,” said Andrew. “Our goal is to put as much stuff into Brex as possible, because the more that's in budgets, the more we can do in real time, the more control we have across all kinds of spend.”
Budgets have improved the user experience as well. “Employees no longer worry about which card to use. They use one card, and it’s all controlled on the back end,” said Andrew. Employees save 4 hours a month on expense reporting and compliance is up to 89% — plus, reimbursements are rarely needed. “Reimbursements have gone down because we’ve enabled employees with one card, the right rule set, and streamlined approvals, saving managers 10 hours a week.”
Superhuman is also saving hours a month on closing the books with real-time syncing. “We’re not ingesting SVB statements, Expensify data, etc. Now it all comes through Brex and is coded in our GL correctly,” said Andrew. Perhaps the most exciting impact has been the visibility. “The ah-ha moment for me as a finance leader was — I can put everything in Brex. Everything can be controlled by a budget. If spending is approaching limits in one area, I know in real time and can talk to leaders about possible tradeoffs.”
Going forward, Superhuman feels confident they have the real-time visibility they need to cost-effectively guide the world to inbox zero. Andrew shared, “We're able to focus on maximizing our runway and being cost-efficient. 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 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.”
— Andrew Maher, Head of Finance, Superhuman
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