Red Aspen fuels growth with BILL

“BILL Spend & Expense is life-saving. It has streamlined and changed our workflow for the better and it fits our culture; it’s a service that I would pay for, but the fact that it’s free is just icing on the cake.”

The summary

Like many rapidly growing businesses, Red Aspen relied on expense management processes that did the job, but were disorganized and inefficient. When Matthew Kuzio joined Red Aspen as CFO, he saw a world of opportunity to control spending and gain a better understanding of the company’s finances—if they could just find the right solution to remove tactical expense management obstacles.

Before implementing BILL Spend & Expense, the team at Red Aspen had a number of cumbersome processes for managing expenses. One example: having a single customer service employee in charge of managing all expense reports. This meant one person sorting through piles of receipts, attempting to categorize spend, and loading everything into a shared drive. It also meant a clunky process that left room for error in categorization, not to mention taking the customer service employee away from customers.

Additionally, with no concept of a company budget, teams never felt empowered to spend. As a self-funded startup, Red Aspen was frugal by nature; but they had outgrown this conservative mindset and needed to spend to fuel their marketing strategy. However, teams were apprehensive to spend, not knowing if they had permission or what amounts were available to them.

“People were erring on the side of not spending when they probably should have been. BILL Spend & Expense gave us the structure and the controls to allow good spending. The whole process changed from a permission-based structure to ‘I have a budget and I can spend it on what will move the business forward.’”

After joining the team as CFO, one of Matt’s first priorities was rolling out BILL Spend & Expense. Having used it at a prior company, he knew his team would love BILL Spend & Expense for a few reasons:

1. It’s user friendly. Employees don’t have to be an accountant or have a finance background to understand what their budget is and how to categorize their spend.
2. It allows for true budgeting. To create budgets where there weren’t any before, Matt translated business needs into departmental budgets. This helped each team feel empowered to spend.
3. It allows the delegation of spend authority and responsibilities. Managers are able to look into BILL Spend & Expense at any time and see how much they have left to spend from their budget (instead of waiting until month end to find out what’s left—or how badly they’ve gone over).
4. It makes for an easy month end. From the accounting side, Matt can provide oversight and then pass practically complete books to their bookkeeper.
5. It saves everyone time. Matt himself saves 20-30 hours a month, just in accounting tasks.

The way that BILL Spend & Expense allows users to code transactions makes it possible for Matt to generate an amount of reporting that he simply could not do before—with a level of detail that, without BILL Spend & Expense, would have taken hundreds of hours. Simply put, “BILL Spend & Expense is life-saving.”

And if all of these improvements weren’t enough, BILL Spend & Expense is also free. Matt concludes, “BILL Spend & Expense is a service that I would pay for, but the fact that it’s free is just icing on the cake.”