Company spend management platforms are becoming more and more common these days. They’re an awesome way to keep track of everything that your company is spending money on with lots of cool ways to manipulate that data and have great insights.
Like I said, there are many, many out there. There’s Brex, Ramp, Spendesk, Airbase, Mesh Payments, Divvy, etc. Obviously they’re pretty cool if there are that many of them. Honestly, I think we live in a time where every company should have one of these. It makes life kind of a dream for day-to-day accounting as well as a whole host of other things.
I’m going to tell you a little bit about the particular spend management platform that we use at Lemonade Stand. We think that it’s the best one out there, and we absolutely love it. It makes my life in particular much, much easier than it would be without it.
We use Divvy, and it is seriously amazing.
Let me tell you why!
Virtual Cards
In all honesty, the single greatest aspect of Divvy might just be the virtual card creation. There are tons and tons of features that I love and adore, but this one might take the cake.
Divvy offers you the ability to create an unlimited number of virtual credit cards. This just means that there is no physical card attached to it. Everything else is the same as if it were a normal card. You get a card number, expiration date, CVV code, everything you need! To anyone else taking the card for payment, it appears as a totally normal card. No downsides, really!
But why is that so cool?
Let me just tell ya.
Gone are the days of updating every single vendor you’ve ever had when a card needs to be changed.
If you’re running a business, it’s likely that you have more than just one or two people or companies that you pay, right? Yeah. Probably.
So, if you’re running that business, and you have a business credit card from some company like American Express, Discover, or even just with your own bank, and that card has fraudulent activity, or maybe it expires, what happens?
You get a new card, right?
Yeah, no big deal.
But now what do you have to do? Well, now you have to log in to a hundred different websites or make phone calls to a hundred different vendors or send emails to a thousand different accounting departments to let them know that you need to update the card on file for your billing.
That’s a headache and a half – maybe even two. Trust me.
Plus, there’s no way to know if there’s going to be fraud on that card again in the next week, and you might have to do that all over again!
We’re talking hours upon hours of extra work that you really don’t need.
Solution?
Virtual cards!
The virtual cards that you can create in Divvy’s spend management platform completely eradicate this issue. Instead of having one card that all of your different vendors have, you can create an individual card for every single person or company that you do business with. It takes about all of thirty seconds to create these cards (plus you can build in automated rules to the cards that help with your accounting for expenses i.e. client, company, category, classification, etc.).
So, every time that we have a new vendor or sign up for a new software or literally anything that is going to need continual payments, we create a new virtual card in Divvy and then provide those specific card details for that payment.
The beauty of this is that, if that one card were compromised due to fraud or expired or had to be canceled for whatever reason – maybe that vendor refuses to stop charging you after you’ve requested to stop services, whatever that reason might be – all of the other cards that you have with all of the other vendors and businesses stay perfectly intact as if nothing ever happened. You have to create one new card and update one vendor.
That is all.
It’s pretty awesome what these virtual cards can do. Far and away our most used feature of Divvy.
A FREE Spend Management Platform
Another top feature of Divvy is the fact that this spend management platform is 100% free to the customer!
I don’t know that I really need to say more about this.
It’s free.
It will cost you nothing.
“But doesn’t that mean that the software probably sucks and never gets updates and stuff?”
You might think so! But, no! I said that the platform is free to the customer, not that Divvy doesn’t have any way to make money. Divvy is very much a for-profit company and brings in revenue just like any other business, which is used to constantly update the software and make it a better, more robust, and more powerful platform.
Honestly, I see more updates and new features coming from Divvy than just about any other platform I have ever used. It is completely customer focused even though you won’t be paying a direct bill to Divvy.
Pretty awesome!
So if you’ve had reservations about hopping on the spend management train because of how much it might cost, you can toss that worry aside and sign up for Divvy today!
Budgets and Transactions
I could nerd out for a long time and talk about how cool Divvy is for its reporting and how much it helps from an accounting standpoint.
Now, unless you’re an accountant like me or some other kind of weirdo who loves this type of stuff, I don’t want to kill you with boredom describing every aspect of this spend management platform (although, if you have questions about this aspect, please feel free to hit me up at [email protected]. I’d be more than happy to chat about how much Divvy has helped us). Let it suffice to say that using Divvy will pretty much automate your expense tracking for bookkeeping/tax purposes, and that’s kind of amazing.
You can get a lot of data and insight about where your company is spending money through the use of the budget and transactions features. You can sort, chop, filter, and look through that data in basically every way possible.
Budgets also allow you to put some pretty fantastic internal controls in place to lock down how, when, where, and by who spending is occurring. You can also empower your team members by making them owners or admins of certain entire budgets. This puts the power in their hands to control a limited amount of funds (approved by you, the main company admin) that can be spent as necessary by their team. So much that you can do!
There’s a lot of meat in there, and it really is quite wonderful!
Divvy Mobile App
Divvy has an app so good and so polished that sometimes it seems like this whole platform was built to be a mobile app rather than a desktop/web-based app.
Pretty much anything and everything that you can do on your computer, you can do on your phone.
This makes it crazy efficient for people/admins who are on the go a lot or prefer to do quick little adjustments to things from their phones without needing to log in on an actual computer.
Now, reporting and diving into data and all that kind of stuff, I would still suggest doing from a computer – not necessarily because of app limitations, but I think you’ll just be a happier person.
Everything else, though? Yeah, I’d take the app honestly. Creating cards, assigning funds, approving fund requests, recording transaction details, all of that nitty gritty stuff? SO easy in the app!
The transaction details alone make the app absolutely shine in my opinion. When you spend money on your Divvy card, you get a notification that there has been a new transaction in your account, and you’re invited to enter the details of that right away. If you need a receipt attached to that transaction, you don’t need to save that receipt, scan it in, fax it to yourself, email it yourself, edit it in PDF format, and then attach it to some kind of expense report.
No, no.
That sounds horrible.
All you have to do is snap a picture of that receipt right within the app, fill out a few quick notes about the transaction, and the “expense report” is done. Gonezo. Flawless.
It’s amazing!
I love the Divvy app and will sing its praises until the day I die.
Divvy has found an amazing way to simplify this process that was once very complex, cumbersome and hated by all. It’s SO easy now!
The way that I see it is that Divvy is basically the Apple of spend management platforms. I’ve looked into a lot of different platforms, and some of them might get super, super technical and in depth on certain things that Divvy doesn’t, but what Divvy does is simplify. It makes everything easier. It looks nice. It works smoothly, and it is incredibly user friendly. Similar to how you might be able to argue that an Android phone can “do” more than an iPhone, but you’d need a ten-year education in computer science, coding, and software development to be able to figure it out. This is how I view Divvy, and it’s one of my favorite aspects of it. Other platforms have argued to me that their reporting is more powerful and this and that, but looking at them, man it’s complicated. Divvy, again, just makes things easy. It’s fantastic! I’m pretty partial towards iPhone, obviously, and I’m just as partial towards Divvy for some of the same reasons.
The final reason that I love Divvy is that its team is outward minded.
Divvy Culture
At Lemonade Stand, we love to do business with good people. We love people who think about other people in the way that they go about their work. We love people who embody the ideology of Build Then Bless.
Divvy is always thinking of others.
One of the best things about Divvy and one of the reasons that we love using Divvy is because of the way that its team promotes other companies and people.
An incredible example of that is a billboard that Divvy has had going for quite some time now. This billboard doesn’t say “Use Divvy, we’re the best!” or “Divvy’s competitors suck. Why don’t you try not sucking? Use Divvy!” Nothing like that at all.
It simply says “Thank you for growing with us.” It then filters through a bunch of really awesome companies who are doing well and growing right alongside Divvy. It’s purely to build up other companies and promote the fact they’re growing.
Divvy is always celebrating the growth of other companies around it.
It’s pretty awesome to see them doing this. We love it!
So, if you’re looking for a really great spend management platform backed by a team of really awesome people who think outside of themselves, I invite you to give the people at Divvy a call and see what they can do for you!