Human-I-T helps save the planet — as well as time and money with Empower.
The TL;DR
Human-I-T was using separate corporate cards for executive travel and the accounting team’s procurement needs.
The accounting team was saddled with manual work as they had minimal visibility into spend across budgets.
With Brex, Human-I-T’s accountants are able to close the books faster and focus on more strategic work to drive business impact.
The Impact
2-3 days
Saved on every month-end close
50%
Reduction in employee reimbursement time with Brex vs Expensify
Company
Founded in 2012, Human-I-T is a social enterprise with 135 employees across the US and Canada that creates equitable access to opportunity by providing devices, internet access, digital skills training, and tech support for communities left on the wrong side of the digital divide. The company also empowers other businesses and organizations to do good by diverting technology from landfills.
Challenge
Human-I-T initially had two corporate cards — one for executives to book their own travel and another card with a higher limit exclusively for the accounting team to use for procurement — and all of their workflows were managed through Asana and TravelBank.
“It was very disjointed,” says Aaron Wilkins, Executive Vice President at Human-I-T. “The budgets were not very easy to manage at that point and there wasn't a lot of visibility and transparency into why something was booked, where they were going, and what we were spending.”
Much of the company’s accounting time each month was spent manually tracking down receipts for the transactions — 200+ transactions per month from just five people spending on their corporate cards. At least one full-time employee was spending eight to nine hours each day only on expense document management and manual data entry. “That's a lot of transactions to manage and have to chase after,” Aaron adds.
On top of that, in order to issue reimbursements to their employees, the Human-I-T accounting team had to go through the labor-intensive process of checking expenses against the receipts, approving them in their internal tool, then submitting the reimbursements separately through Expensify.
“We average a three-day close now… Empower allows us to get quicker at turning around data and information internally.”
— Aaron Wilkins, Executive Vice President, Human-I-T
Solution
Initially, Human-I-T used Brex for its corporate cards, but then transitioned to Brex Empower™ due to how tech-forward and easy to use the platform has been for employees. Now, the company’s entire AP team uses Empower and operates the majority of its procurement through the platform.
“I felt like a lot of the spend management platforms we saw were doing nothing more for me than spitting out the same data about what we spent, and they just weren’t helpful,” Aaron says. “What Brex has always done very well — even before we moved to Empower — is user experience. Empower makes it easier for our internal customers to see that data in real time instead of waiting until they get their monthly P&L from us to understand where they are against their budget.”
“We can use Empower to manage the budget and we can connect to NetSuite, which will be saving us a lot of time from doing new entries or importing them back and forth.”
— Jimmy Luk, Senior Manager of Accounting, Human-I-T
Switching to Empower also allowed the company to consolidate its many tools onto a single source of truth, including cards, spend management, reimbursements, and travel booking. In turn, the integrations and automations with Empower are saving the company time and money. “As an accountant, we always want to look for one solution,” says Jimmy Luk, Senior Manager of Accounting at Human-I-T. “We can use Empower to manage the budget and connect to NetSuite, which saves us a lot of time from doing new entries or importing them back and forth. That makes everything more automated and requires less human effort.”
Impact
With Brex, Human-I-T’s accounting team can simply move faster and focus on more strategic initiatives. “They’re not going to be focusing on document ingestion anymore,” Aaron says. “We can shift gears to communication and to being a group that is focused on a more advisory role.”
Today the company’s accounting team only requires one person to manage fewer than ten receipts each month because the majority of receipts are automatically generated and reconciled. Accountants no longer need to reclassify as many ledger entries thanks to increased automation, compliance, and real-time visibility. “We average a three-day close now,” Aaron says. “We were at a five- to seven-day close because AP was trying to track down what each expense was, why we were spending it, and who was doing the spending. Empower allows us to get quicker at turning around data and information internally.” Additionally, because accounting can submit, approve, and reimburse expenses all in one platform, employees are receiving their reimbursements in as few as two days, instead of five to seven days with Expensify.
“One of our sayings at Human-I-T is ‘make it easy to do good.’ I think Brex does that really well — and that’s made it easier for our AP team to do good.”
— Aaron Wilkins, Executive Vice President, Human-I-T
“The efficiency gains made with Brex open up new opportunities for strategy and career growth,” Aaron says. “Brex allows our employees to grow [in their roles] and learn how to use these solutions without adding three to five additional people to our team to support larger volumes of transactions.”
Finally, as a forward-thinking tech company with a mission to create social good, Human-I-T shares an ideological foundation with Brex in its pursuit of innovative solutions to complex problems. “One of our sayings at Human-I-T is ‘make it easy to do good,’” Aaron adds. “I think Brex does that really well — and that’s made it easier for our AP team to do good, which in turn makes it easier for them to interact with our internal customers.”
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