Backburner Labs switched from Mercury to Brex and cut reconciliation time by 90%

Manual reconciliation consuming 30 hours per month with Mercury

As an engineering firm buying materials for multiple client projects simultaneously, Backburner Labs faced a reconciliation nightmare. All 30 employees had corporate cards and were constantly purchasing materials for different customer projects. The company processed roughly 500 transactions per month, close to 6,000 annually, totaling around $150,000 in monthly card spend.

Their previous setup with Mercury for cards and Wells Fargo for banking created constant friction. Mercury lacked custom fields and accounting automation capabilities, forcing the finance team into a brutal month-end process. "I literally had to have Mercury up on one screen and Xero up on another screen, and I'm copying and pasting in statement descriptors," Parker Schlank, CFO, recalls.

The complexity stemmed from Backburner Labs’ business model: they had to itemize every material purchase back to individual customers with descriptions on every client invoice. Without automation, this meant 30-plus hours of manual reconciliation every month. Employees were freehanding expense descriptions, and the finance team was manually categorizing whether expenses were billable or non-billable.

Beyond reconciliation, Backburner Labs had issues with multiple compromised cards, and a lack of spend limit controls. And when trying to find a way to consolidate banking on the platform, Mercury required $250,000 in deposits before they could unlock treasury features.

Brex’s AI-native platform with deep policy enforcement and amazing rewards

Parker turned to Brex to consolidate both banking and card spend management into one platform. The company fully migrated from Mercury and Wells Fargo to Brex in under 30 days with the help of a dedicated team. “You're just a number on other banking platforms. With Brex I knew I could pick up the phone and talk to someone who knows our business and knows how we're growing,” Parker said.

The transformation centered on three key capabilities. First, Backburner Labs partnered with Brex's team to build a custom integration with Xero that automated their entire reconciliation process. The integration creates customer-facing statement descriptors automatically and uses the AI automation on the accounting module to assign GL accounts based on employee inputs.

Brex's policy engine helped Parker define rules for company spending that would be automatically enforced, which was critical for capturing the right data upfront. Within the cardholder policy settings, Backburner Labs created dynamic fields that appear based on employee selections. If someone marks an expense as customer billable, additional fields automatically appear asking what type of project it is. The accounting module then uses these inputs to automate GL account assignment.

And for spend controls, the company leverages single-use Brex purchasing cards to minimize fraud risk. When employees need to make large purchases, they request a purchasing card with a specific limit. After the employee spends up to that limit, the card is effectively dead. "We're issuing a single-use purchasing card to minimize any of the fraud risk," Parker explains. Employees can also self-request limit increases or new cards as needed.

“Brex knocked it out of the park with the AI automation on the accounting module and the custom integration with Xero.”

— Parker Schlank, CFO, Backburner Labs

90% time savings and $30K in annual treasury yield

Brex transformed Backburner Labs’ financial operations across every dimension after switching from Mercury. The most dramatic impact: collapsing month-end reconciliation from 30 hours to less than 3 hours, a 90% reduction in time spent.

The automated workflow now works seamlessly: employees fill in custom fields at the point of purchase, Brex AI generates professional memo descriptions, and the Xero integration populates everything directly into the accounting system exactly how it needs to appear on customer invoices. "The cardholders are filling all that information in, and then the integration is just populating it right into Xero, exactly how we need it, customer-facing on the invoice," Parker says.

The quality of expense descriptions has also improved dramatically. "The AI-generated memos are very, very good. The quality of our descriptions has gone up tenfold," Parker notes.

Beyond time savings, Brex's treasury product generates approximately $30,000 in interest annually, yield that wasn't available with Mercury's $250,000 deposit requirement or Wells Fargo's traditional banking.

Fraud risk dropped significantly with the single-use purchasing card approach and granular spend limit controls. After experiencing multiple compromised cards, Backburner Labs now has the ability to "lock things down really closely from a fraud standpoint."

For a 30-person company pushing $2 million in annual card volume across 6,000 transactions, the operational efficiency gains have been transformative. Employees use the mobile app extensively for purchases and expense coding, and the platform scales effortlessly as the company grows. "We wouldn't be able to manage these processes without the capabilities of Brex. It has added a tremendous amount of value to all of our processes," says Parker.

Ready to see how Brex can streamline your financial operations? Sign up for Brex today and discover how our integrated platform can eliminate the complexity of managing multiple financial tools while delivering measurable time and cost savings.