SeatGeek reduces T&E costs by 50% and automates nearly 100% of accounting entries with Brex.

Manual expense and accounting workflows, lost time, and limited visibility

SeatGeek's finance and accounting teams were struggling with inefficient spend management workflows. “Our accounting team was drowning in manual work," says Teddy Collins, VP of Corporate Finance. "At one point, expense card close consumed nearly three full working days — reconciling 15 shared department cards, tracking down receipts, and manually coding transactions.”

Additionally, nearly all of SeatGeek’s employee expenses were processed through reimbursements, which meant no upfront spend controls or visibility. Teddy says: “With our legacy system, people booked their own travel for events, meetings, and live ticket experiences, making it harder for teams to stay aligned.” Since expenses were submitted up to 90 days later, the FP&A team had little insight or control over overall spending, and employees had to wait a long time to get paid back.

These issues led to SeatGeek’s spend management solution falling short of its internal satisfaction score goals among company tools. Teddy sought to change that through an intuitive finance platform with AI-powered automation.

Integrated platform for automation, control, and real-time visibility

SeatGeek’s accounting team had been through several RFPs to find a virtual card solution that would improve accounting efficiency, proactively control spend, provide real-time visibility and transparency, and support its expanding global employee base.

After a thorough evaluation of the market, SeatGeek chose Brex's comprehensive finance platform of integrated corporate cards, expense management, accounting automation, and corporate travel — all powered by AI workflows.

“As a growing and global company, we needed to uplevel our financial systems, processes, and risk controls,” says Teddy. “Brex helps us do that with enterprise-grade spend controls, automation, and integrations. Real-time spending insights have transformed how we manage budgets and accounts payable processes. Brex also had a better administrative experience with fewer touches.“

The company shifted from reimbursements to a card-first approach, now handling 95% of expenses through Brex cards. With Brex’s auto-generated receipts, smart approval workflows, GL auto-categorization, and customizable spend limits, SeatGeek can drive smarter spending and meaningful efficiencies. Brex also works across SeatGeek’s entities in the UK, Israel, and other regions in the local currency, providing a localized user experience with unified oversight.

“AI-powered solutions like Brex help employees spend their time better,” he says. “With Brex, employees don’t have to fill out expense reports, and there’s more accurate data for the finance team. Even a single-digit percentage increase in productivity delivers high ROI.”

“With integrated spend management and travel, we cut T&E costs by 50% with only a 15% reduction in travel. We redeployed those funds to double the size of our hiring funnel.”

— Teddy Collins, Vice President of Corporate Finance at SeatGeek

Automated accounting, 10x faster close, and a premium employee experience

SeatGeek uses Brex to proactively control expenses, automate accounting, and reduce the burden on finance. “With Brex, we can provide an end-to-end experience — from budget requests to approvals to empowering teams to spend, all while automating accounting,” Teddy says. “And we’re able to strike a balance, preventing unauthorized spending while maintaining a positive experience. In fact, Brex helps us achieve a 99% employee compliance rate with its built-in automations and reminders.”

SeatGeek employees are happier, too, since they don’t have to deal with clunky reimbursements and waiting months to get repaid: “With Brex, our employees actually like our T&E and expense process. It’s rated near the top, along with Slack and Gmail. People are very delighted with Brex, and finance has gotten props for bringing transparency to the budgeting process.”

With Brex AI auto-coding 99.7% of transactions and automating receipts, memos, and GL categorization, SeatGeek reduced the time required for documentation compliance from 22 hours to just 2 hours. “Our accounting team no longer manually downloads receipts and matches them with expense line items in another tool. It’s 10x faster with Brex, and month-end close takes 15 minutes,” Teddy says.

Brex also optimized SeatGeek’s corporate travel spend. Features like group events streamline the travel experience while improving policy compliance and savings. “With integrated spend management and travel, we cut T&E costs by 50% with only a 15% reduction in travel,” Teddy says. “We redeployed those funds to double the size of our hiring funnel.”

Maybe best of all, Teddy's team can now focus more on strategic growth. “As a finance team, our mandate is to maximize the enterprise value of the company,” he says. “We're not creating new opportunities if we're constantly chasing paper trails. Brex reduces our month-end close effort in a more compliant way, while helping FP&A administer budgets in real time instead of weeks after the fact. We reduced finance overhead for expense management by about 95% within six months of onboarding. This is how you get ahead.”