The Benefits of Making the Financial Process Human-Centered

By customizing their financial processes around the needs of everyone who uses them, HUMAN made purchasing a seamless experience for employees, while maintaining full visibility and control over company spend.

Keep reading to see how HUMAN:

• Eliminated clunky expense reports and reimbursement processes
• Replaced best-guess accounting with accurate real-time spend data
• Streamline their financial process and shortened their month-end close by 3 days
• Empowered employees to focus on strategy and growth

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How HUMAN made the financial processes more human-centered

Bots are responsible for 77% of cyberattacks. HUMAN’S mission is to stop them—to keep the internet human by safeguarding websites from these fraudulent attackers.

Similarly, HUMAN lives and breathes that same philosophy internally, with a strong emphasis on the professional and personal development of its “humans.” However, during the first four years of Karl McGregor’s career at HUMAN, the finance processes and policies didn’t align with that mission.

The dreaded month-end close

At HUMAN, one corporate card would be shared across multiple team members—and even office locations—so the only way for finance to understand where spend came from was to ask. After uncovering who spent what, Karl had to code every transaction and manually track all receipts. It took weeks of playing detective to make the numbers add up at the end of the month. “We never knew who was buying what on what card,” explains Karl.

For Jonathan Leitscuh, a cybersecurity researcher through HUMAN’s Dan Kaminsky fellowship, month-end close meant “a huge spreadsheet–I had to itemize everything–and I just wanted to do my work! I didn’t want to do that stuff.” Dan is an active member of the cybersecurity industry, often traveling for conferences like Black Hat and Defcon.

Prior to Teampay, travel meant worrying about having enough money to float through his bank account and getting reimbursed.

You'd never know when your request was approved—you'd never be alerted—so you'd have to be signed into the app at all times. There was also this security feature that would generate a code for every purchase, but that only went to the original cardholder. It was this never-ending ‘can’t process this purchase’. -Jonathan Leitschuh, DAN Kaminsky Fellow

Struggling for a workaround, HUMAN tried a virtual card add-on to their corporate card solution, but it proved unfriendly to users.

HUMAN wanted a software solution that would:

1. Accommodate a complex organizational structure
2. Eliminate manual coding
3. Make purchasing seamless

At this point, Karl knew exactly what he wanted in a new solution. He just had to find it.

The journey to humanizing expenses

HUMAN has a complex organizational structure, with different business entities, office locations in three different countries and team members scattered even wider.

Teampay solved two major pain points for HUMAN:

1. Corporate card reconciliation - With Teampay, the name on a corporate card matches the person who used it. The team no longer has to wait for a credit card bill because all transactions are automatically recorded in Teampay, coded correctly, and synced into Sage Intacct. Teampay even syncs transactions to specific entities and currencies as needed. “Even if transactions aren’t all cleared by the end of the month, I know exactly what’s there, and I can make an accrual for it.”
2. Employee purchasing experience - With Teampay, HUMAN employees feel empowered to buy what they need the moment they need it by requesting funds through a conversational Slackbot. Currently, Teampay provides virtual cards for HUMAN employees across 10 countries.

Month-end close: from 10 days to 7 and counting

Along with automatic reconciliation and a seamless purchasing experience, month-end close is no longer the nightmare it used to be. “I now spend way less time processing spend, and more time doing analysis,” says Karl. So far, Teampay has helped HUMAN shorten month-end close by three days, and Karl anticipates this term will get even shorter. “Teampay empowers employees to make their own decisions, but finance can maintain oversight and stay agile as needed.”

An unexpected bonus

With Teampay, HUMAN has seen an uptick in benefit usage. HUMAN offers a variety of benefits to its employees, including stipends for health and wellness and a home office setup. “Before we had Teampay, people were not taking advantage of their stipends,” explains Karl.

Employees no longer face friction while making purchases by eliminating clunky expense reports and reimbursement processes. Karl was able to create rules to support these stipends easily. He even wrote a scripted request for employees to copy and paste into Slack for automatic approval.

With Teampay, HUMAN’s financial processes are finally more human.