How Blackstone scaled expense management while earning rewards

Blackstone is on a mission to redefine how people cook outdoors. With a brand vision to “Cook Anything, Anytime, Anywhere,” the company’s lineup of outdoor griddles and accessories have made the company a go-to for grillers and foodies of all kinds. And its company culture is all about bringing its people together—through food. 

“Our marketing department, our R&D department, they're constantly cooking food, whether they're going to eat it and cook for their team or whether they're going to photograph it,” says Tracy Owens, their Accounting Manager. “Sometimes they're trying out new products or recipes. The smells are amazing—and we’re all really well fed.” 

Managing expenses is a lot like cooking, because without the right ingredients, it all falls apart. Blackstone was missing a few key elements, forcing them to rely on manual data entry and disparate systems. In the end, this meant a lot of wasted time. 

Challenge: Data silos and a crashing platform

As Blackstone grew, the finance and accounting team expanded to 13 people, and they needed a solution to help scale their expense management processes to match their business needs. "Our legacy systems were creating more headaches than they were solving," says Owens. "We were constantly battling data silos, and it was nearly impossible to get a consolidated, accurate view of our financial health without a lot of manual effort."

Owens explains the specific pain points with their previous credit card provider, "Their online platform was really hard to navigate, and I found that it crashed all the time. I would log in to look at receipts so that I could correctly classify all the expenses for the month, and after every receipt I looked at, it would crash and I would have to log out and start over." 

Because of this cumbersome process, transactions were never categorized, so spenders had to manually match each one with a receipt. “That was the biggest waste of time," Owens says.

Solution: Automating those tedious tasks

To address these pain points, Blackstone decided to invest in a comprehensive financial management platform. BILL Spend & Expense impressed the team because of its powerful, easy-to-use features. 

"We knew we needed a solution that could grow with us and provide the scalability we required," explains Owens. "The platform promised to automate many of our tedious tasks and give us the real-time insights we desperately needed." 

And BILL delivered on those promises. “BILL Spend & Expense has literally saved my sanity,” Owens says. 

Results: Efficiency, accuracy, and accountability

Adopting BILL Spend & Expense brought about significant changes for Blackstone's accounting operations. 

Automated expense processing saved Owens a substantial amount of time. "Before BILL, I was spending probably three days at the end of each month going through all the credit card expenses,” Owens says. “Going from three days of trying to get through hundreds of transactions with a very small number of cardholders to being able to get it all done in three hours with over 40 cardholders is a huge time savings for me."  

With BILL, cardholders just upload a receipt, choose a category and budget, and add a quick note about the expense. This has made the workflow more efficient for the accounting team. “I can just filter and sort and upload it all with very minimal manual touching," Owens says. 

The system also creates accountability for expenses. "If there's a repeat offender that is continuously not completing their transactions, we can just freeze their card until they can step up to the plate and take care of their responsibilities," explains Owens. This targeted approach has proved to be much more effective than the previous solution of sending out companywide emails to all cardholders to take care of their receipts. ‍

“BILL has simplified our processes by enabling our cardholders to easily categorize their monthly expenses, allowing us to save time on expense reports and reconciliations."

The ability to pre-approve and correct expense categories throughout the month has been a big improvement. "When I do get to the end of the month and my close process, I can just whiz through it," Owens says. This also provides visibility into where money is spent, how it’s being used, and who is spending it. 

Another key benefit has been the rewards program. "Seeing that deposit into our bank account every month for those rewards from the prior statement period, that's been amazing," Owens shares. "Through the end of March, we had earned over $60,000 in rewards just from doing our everyday business. We haven't done anything differently."* 

Issuing new cards to more employees turned out to be a game changer. “We were probably up to $12,000 in petty cash every month, and the impact has been profound," reflects Owens. "Our team is happier, more productive, and we have a much clearer picture of our financial standing at any given moment. This transformation has truly empowered our accounting department."

Summary: A blueprint for financial transformation

Blackstone's journey highlights the critical importance of modernizing financial infrastructure to achieve operational excellence. By embracing BILL and its integrated, automated platform, the company overcame challenges of manual processes and data inconsistencies to establish a scalable foundation for future growth.

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*Individual results vary. Typical annual rewards are calculated following this billing cycle.