Introducing Rippling Spend Management 

Not only will Rippling Spend Management allow you to further consolidate your workforce systems into a single platform—you can control far more spend across your company with far less administrative work than standalone spend solutions.

Before we dive into the details, though, it’s important to understand the limitations of today’s standalone spend management systems. 

The two big problems with today’s standalone spend management systems

Problem #1: You can’t view and manage all of your company’s spend in one place

Standalone spend systems are disconnected from your payroll system. As a result, you can’t view your company’s biggest spend of all—headcount costs—alongside your card transactions, reimbursements, and bill payments. 

This makes it impossible to report on all of your monthly cash burn in one place. Instead, your team has to spend countless hours running reports in different systems and/or manually crunching the numbers in Excel to get the data they need. 

This disconnect creates other issues that slow your whole company down and make it harder to manage spend.

For example, payroll admins typically investigate large reimbursements before they run payroll. But in order to figure out what an expense was for, who approved it, and why, they have to constantly switch between their payroll and spend systems to get all of the info they need.

Problem #2: Your spend management system is disconnected from your HR system and employee data, which creates more work for everyone across the company

Standalone spend systems are disconnected from your core HRIS and source of truth for employee data, so they have little to no data beyond spend data. Even basic information, like departments, titles, and levels, are largely missing.

This significantly limits your ability to control out-of-policy spending across your company and creates an endless wave of admin work for HR, Finance, managers, and employees.

For example:

• Want to block employee spend based on location or department? No can do.  Standalone systems don’t have that data. You can only create basic and broad policies, like “block all transactions over $500,” which only control some out-of-policy spend. The rest either falls through the cracks or has to be manually reviewed and approved by multiple people across the company.
• Want to instantly give your Chief Marketing Officer or senior sales managers visibility into their own team’s spend? Sorry.  Standalone systems don’t know your departments, employee levels, etc. They have no way of automatically giving teams visibility into their own spend. So everyone ends up spending countless hours tracking spend in spreadsheets and pinging Finance to get the info they need.

• Want to automatically route expenses over $1,000 to an HR Business Partner and Department Head for review and approval? Too bad. Again, standalone spend systems have no context on your org structure (like titles and departments), so you can only automate basic approval chains like, “If an expense is over $1,000 then send to {insert specific employee}.” As a result, more out-of-policy spend falls through the cracks and admins have to spend a lot more time manually reviewing and approving expenses.
• Want your employees to be able to view their expenses, paystubs, PTO, and benefits in a single mobile app? You’re out of luck. Your employees can’t view all their HR data in one place because all of their spend data lives in a separate system, which means less happy employees and more questions for Finance. 

Rippling Spend Management is built different

Rippling Spend Management—which consists of corporate cards, an expense management system, and bill pay software (coming soon)—is unlike anything else on the market, as it solves all of the foundational problems above.

View and manage all of your monthly cash burn in one place

Because Rippling Spend Management is deeply integrated with Rippling Payroll, you can manage and report on all of your spend in one place—not just card transactions, reimbursements, and invoices, but payroll too. No more logging into different systems or merging data in Excel to figure out your monthly cash burn.

There are more big benefits that Finance leaders and Controllers will really appreciate:

• You can reimburse employees via payroll with zero effort, since everyone’s approved expenses automatically sync with Rippling Payroll.

• You can drill down into employee’s expenses directly inside of every payrun, which means you no longer have to switch between Rippling and a third-party spend management system to figure out why you need to reimburse an employee $5,000. This also means you won’t have to interrogate employees about their expenses, which can sometimes be uncomfortable. 

• You can automatically sync all of your spend to the right categories and periods in your general ledger from one place—saving you hundreds of hours of EOM reconciliation and reporting. You can even sync card transactions to your general ledger and use policies to automatically categorize each transaction’s fields, saving your team the painstaking work of matching every transaction to a GL category. 

• You can give your employees the power to view everything they care about in one mobile app—from their receipts to PTO to paystubs.

Block far more out-of-policy spend across your company, with far less effort

Rippling Spend Management is built on top of the Employee Graph—your company’s single source of truth for employee data—so you can create far more granular spend policies and automatically apply them to the right people.

This allows you to automatically block far more out-of-policy spend before it happens, so your team doesn’t have to spend dozens of hours per month manually reviewing, approving, and reconciling expenses.

For example, employees will often use their personal credit card to buy software licenses for themselves or their team—like Microsoft Office or Adobe—and then expense it to the company, despite the fact that the company already has a corporate license or strictly prohibits the software. Suddenly your company is spending a significant amount of money on out-of-policy software licenses without knowing it!

Standalone spend systems can’t automatically block this spend, because they don’t have the data you need to create the policy to block it in the first place.

So, how do you solve this problem in Rippling? Easy. You can create the policy shown below in minutes and never have to worry about out-of-policy software spending again, because Rippling knows exactly what licenses your company has and which employees to apply the policy to.

Here’s another example.

Because of the rise in remote work, more and more companies are offering employees a home office stipend to purchase things like office chairs and monitors.

With Rippling, you can create a custom policy to automatically approve any expense for office equipment under $500—but only for remote employees who have been with the company for more than 90 days.

Again, standalone systems can’t do this because they don’t know which of your employees are remote or their tenure.

Automate your corporate card program from end to end

Rippling Corporate Cards are the first corporate cards with a built-in back office that eliminates nearly all of the administrative work your team has to do today to issue, manage, and revoke cards.

You can automatically issue cards with your logo to new hires with pre-set limits and spend policies based on their role in Rippling (manager, CEO, etc.). Then, when you offboard them, automatically revoke their card. Rippling will even update their card limit and policies whenever there’s an employee lifecycle event, like a promotion.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you want to automate the management of the corporate card program for your sales team.

1. First, you can create a card group to automatically issue physical corporate cards to all Sales Executives in the Enterprise Field Sales department who have been with the company more than 90 days.
2. Then, set a pre-set spend limit of $1,500 and only approve expenses for specific categories, such as “Client Meals” and “Client Travel.”
3. Lastly, apply any policies you’d like—like blocking transactions over $400 while also alerting the employee of any blocked transaction with an SMS message. 

Along with approval routing, access to bills is restricted based on employee attributes, like department and level, as well as invoice data. That means each person can only view and approve bills relevant to their role.

Answer any question about your spend, big or small

With all of your spend consolidated into Rippling, you can get insights into salaries, card transactions, reimbursements, and bills all in one place.

Rippling is the only platform where you can control access and visibility based on roles. That means every manager has the power to run in-depth reports on their own slice of spend—and no one else’s.

Easily manage all of your company’s spend around the world 

Rippling Spend Management was built from the ground up with global workforces in mind. We wanted to make everything feel completely seamless, so even if an employee in India submits an expense to a Finance Business Partner in the US, neither person has to deal with all of the typical headaches like converting currencies. 

Here are just a few of the ways we’re simplifying global spend management:

• You can reimburse people in over 100 countries in any currency you want
• When an employee submits a receipt by email or through a photo in our mobile app, Rippling automatically scans the receipt and converts the transaction amount into the local currency of the person reviewing it
• Rippling flags mismatches between the transactions employees enter and receipts they upload—even when they’re in different currencies
• Employees can use our corporate card in nearly every country in the world 

Ready to see Rippling Spend Management in action?

You can use every Rippling Spend Management product separately or go all-in-one and manage your corporate cards, expenses, and bills through Rippling right off the bat.

Schedule a demo with our team today.

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NMLS Company Identification 1931820.