How Brex cards and software are transforming spend management by focusing on the user experience

• As companies grow and become more distributed, they need a streamlined, efficient way to enable spend.
• Enabling and tracking spend and expenses is a headache for employees and finance departments.
• Brex's spend management solution makes this process much easier for teams around the world.

No matter how large your company is today, there was likely a time when it was a smaller, scrappier team with everyone wearing a lot of hats and operating with a high degree of trust and autonomy. Then growth happened — sometimes fast. And while most of what came with having a bigger team was awesome, that growth also required more policies to take the place of trust — and more processes to replace teamwork and an ownership mentality.

This is especially true for financial matters, like spending policies that can make employees feel like wayward teenagers if they misplace a receipt or accidentally spend above their limits. In reality, one or two incidents of irresponsible spending likely led to burdensome, company-wide policies, and then the entire company had to start complying with tedious controls that slow them down while they're just trying to do their job.

It's time for your company to recapture the trust and speed of those earlier days. With the right tools, like integrated corporate cards and spend management software from Brex, mid-sized and large enterprises can establish a culture of trust, teamwork, buy-in, and financial discipline.

The future of corporate spending is here. It's automated, it's mobile, it's global — and it's changing corporate spending culture in these impactful ways.

It turns your finance team from money police to company heroes

It's no surprise that employees comply with easy rules and policies, but have a harder time navigating complex processes. Most people don't even read their company's expense policies. That puts finance teams in a tough spot — chasing people for receipts, dealing with non-compliant expenses, and ultimately creating even more rules that no one wants. They have to become office villains just to do their job.

Brex ends the standoff and turns corporate spending into a great employee experience by making compliance easy and automatic. Managers can review exceptions, not everything. Even expense policies become visual, timely, and easy to understand since they are baked into the app. Brex provides cards and spend management that teams actually love. And no one's happier about it than the finance team.

It ends the paperwork nightmare with mobile expense tracking

 So much corporate spending is remote by nature — business meals, travel, off sites, mileage, even picking up donuts on the way to the early morning meeting. But in the era of remote work, most employees are still having to collect receipts on every purchase, sometimes toting them halfway around the world before getting back to the office.

With so many expenses being mobile, tracking that spending should be too. Brex is mobile-first. It was built for employees and companies who aren't tied to the office but are globally distributed. Employees can track expenses on the go, and through sophisticated software integrations and exclusive data from credit card networks, Brex can gather receipts for many transactions automatically — no receipt chasing necessary.

It simplifies global spending with real-time visibility and efficient, local reimbursements

Today's companies are increasingly global, managing teams all over the world. It may be the necessary and exciting future of business, but it's also a headache for finance teams. All those currencies. All those transaction fees and data to reconcile. All the different cards for different countries.

Brex isn't just mobile-first; it's global-first. As a single solution for global spend, Brex was built for distributed, international teams. Employees can receive reimbursements all over the world in local currency in two days or less. Brex cards work seamlessly in over 100 countries. The solution enables international teams to work with a single dashboard that allows teams to gain real-time visibility into the true cost of global spending, easily reconcile data, and spend with greater security and less hassle.

It flips corporate spending policies from command and control to trust and verify

Many corporate spending policies can make expense-related conversations feel like an interrogation: What is this expense? Why did we buy this? Who approved this? Is it even compliant? Both innocent mistakes and totally justified expenses can make well-meaning employees feel distrusted and defensive.

Companies can eliminate this dynamic with a spending process that is proactive rather than reactive and use a trust and verify model versus command and control. Brex allows finance teams and managers to request and provision budgets with clearly defined policies in advance and track expenses against those budgets within the app. No more approvals for each expense. No more "interrogations."

Brex is a complete spend solution that doesn't just address the pain points of corporate spending; it reimagines corporate spending for a global, mobile, fast-paced world. By automating compliance and making it easy to follow the rules, Brex helps modern companies return to a culture of trust and accountability while making finance teams — and employees — happy.

Find out more about how Brex can help your company transform the spend management process.

This post was created by Insider Studios with Brex.