How Rippling Spend can help business owners manage their finances

Written by

Erin Steiner,

Edited by

Published on October 30, 2024 | 4 min read

How an all-in-one spend management system can benefit your business

Company expenses can come from vendors, travel, payroll, marketing, etc. Everything needs to be tracked and approved through the proper channels. Most companies devote significant resources to the manual work of ensuring the company’s books are balanced, accurate and meet current standards and regulations.

An all-in-one solution like Rippling Spend eliminates the manual work required to manage company spending. Instead of your team having to fiddle with spreadsheets, connect disparate systems, and chase receipts, everyone can be on the same page with just a few clicks of a mouse using Rippling Spend.

Through its highly rated bill pay, corporate card and expense management solutions, Rippling Spend offers powerful automation and granular controls for approvals and policy enforcement.

Corporate card management with Rippling Spend

An all-in-one solution is particularly helpful when using corporate spending cards. With Rippling Spend Corporate Cards, you can effortlessly issue company cards, proactively enforce built-in expense policies, automate approval workflows, and monitor transactions in real-time.

Instant and unlimited Rippling corporate cards

Rippling Spend cards can be authorized and issued instantly to your employees—both virtually and physically. You can issue as many as you need. If an employee’s card gets lost, you can cancel it and issue them a new card in minutes, not days.

Block non-compliant spending before it happens

In the past, giving an employee a company card could be risky. You had to trust that your employee wouldn’t abuse the privilege. Rippling Spend, on the other hand, allows controllers and executives to create customized policies based on granular employee data, such as department, level, location, and more.

Rippling’s unique policy engine enables finance teams to enforce clear limits on how much money an employee can spend, where they can spend it, and even exactly what they can (or cannot) buy with that money. If an employee uses their company card for an out-of-policy expense, the card will simply block the transaction before it can go through.

Rippling Spend’s robust policy engine and corporate card solutions automatically enforce your company policies and stop waste.

Get cash back rewards for spending

Rippling Spend offers industry-leading cash back for every dollar spent using your company’s Rippling corporate card. Now, your business gets the benefits of credit card rewards while still being able to block wasteful spending before it happens. Get rewards on every purchase, and redeem rewards for statement credits or gift cards.

Manage expenses like magic with Rippling Spend

The more your company grows, the more spending you’ll have to track. Traditionally, this tracking was done manually. This meant that your financial department spent tons of time tracking down receipts, managing expense reports and keeping files up to date. This also often led to end-of-month surprises.

Rippling Spend transforms the way businesses handle their bills from generation to payment. Using AI, invoices are instantly turned into bills and automatically routed to the correct approver based on your company’s custom policies.

While certain compliance regulations prevent companies from going truly paperless, Rippling Spend’s expense tracking system gets your finance department most of the way there. With these powerful automations, your finance team can spend more time on the hard work that matters most.

Automatic flagging of out-of-policy reimbursement requests

Suppose you only issue Rippling corporate cards to a few employees and require the rest to submit traditional reimbursement requests through Rippling Spend’s portal. Rippling Spend automatically flags reimbursement requests for purchases that fall outside the spending policies you’ve put in place. Your finance team now only has to sift through a handful of reimbursements for approval because the rest have been approved automatically.

Hands-free multi-stage approval workflows

The same policies that dictate exactly where, how and how much card-holding employees can spend can be used to expedite those reimbursement approvals. Finance teams can set approval workflows based on employee data (as previously mentioned) and expense amounts.

For example, you can create a policy that states that any SaaS subscription over $200 expensed by a software engineer level II or below must be approved by their direct manager and then by the controller. Rippling Spend can offer fully automated, rich and granular approval workflows like these.

Seamless receipt requests at the time of purchase via SMS or email

Rippling Spend reduces the number of lost or missing receipts by simplifying receipt capture at the time of purchase. Employees receive an automated SMS at the time of purchase. Once they attach a receipt, it shows up in their expenses.

Auto-categorized transactions and syncing with your general ledger

As soon as money leaves your company’s accounts (or a reimbursement is approved), Rippling Spend categorizes the transaction and syncs it to your general ledger (either automatically or via manual sync). You can create reports from vendor invoices, travel or other expenses based on real-time data. This is essential for identifying trends across company-wide spend which can be extremely valuable to company leadership.

The bottom line

While automation is essential, using a different automation tool for each area spend management doesn’t save you time or money. Instead, opt for something more robust.

Rippling Spend is the only spend management solution that consolidates your business’s needs into a single, easy-to-use platform enriched with granular employee data.