For Emotive’s Chief Financial Officer, Will White, one of the biggest problems with using SVB for employees’ corporate cards was that it lacked much-needed functionality, resulting in time wasted whenever he needed to manage employee spending.

“They had a very nice package in terms of the cash back, but the usability was not there,” he said. Adding, replacing, and turning on cards were some of the functions he and his team found difficult and time-consuming with SVB. He also wished for more visibility and control over spending on individual cards to speed up approvals.

“Our accounts payable person would send an email saying, ‘Do you approve?’ And that gets the job done,” he said. “But six months later, I’m digging through the AP inbox asking, ‘Who approved this?’”

As Will and his Finance team of eight started looking for a new solution, they considered platforms like Ramp and Brex. But they knew an ideal solution would solve more than just their expense management problems. SVB didn’t integrate well with their payroll and accounting tools, which meant lots of manual work and misclassified expenses. The right platform would seamlessly integrate with Emotive’s existing tech stack—or, better yet, replace their other tools by offering spend management, payroll, accounting, and other financial management solutions all in one platform.

Will had used Rippling at a previous company before he joined Emotive. 

“For that business, it was perfect, so that was a positive experience,” he said, adding that when he arrived at Emotive, the company used Gusto for payroll and HR services but had outgrown it as they scaled. “It was the time to make an HRIS switch, and in the course of that conversation, we were also evaluating credit card processors. That set the stage for all the reasons we went to Rippling. It just checked every box. The stars aligned with Rippling.”

Will soon realized that Rippling would allow Emotive’s teams to manage payroll, HR, IT, and spend in a single user-friendly platform, eliminating much of the manual work that had been slowing them down. It was exactly the solution he’d been looking for.

When it came to spend management, Rippling was night-and-day compared to SVB. Will and his team can now easily issue individual credit cards to Emotive employees or departments and set rules and limits for when and how they can be used, improving budget management and spend visibility across the organization.

“With Rippling, it’s very easy to get cards, and we have better controls for those digital cards,” he said. “Where before we had one marketing department card, now we have five marketing cards. We have more visibility and control over budgets. If there’s a $500 a month budget, we set the card limit to $600 so we know right away if there’s an overage.”

One of the main reasons Emotive chose Rippling was that it could replace Gusto and Bill.com, in addition to credit cards.

“At the end of the day, having everything in one place was the primary allure,” Will said, adding that this has helped everyone at Emotive work faster since they no longer have to switch between systems.

“With SVB, we'd have to pull our bank statement here, pull this statement here, pull that statement there,” he explained. “Whereas now, we go directly into Rippling and see much, much more detail on what we're spending.”

Will went on to illustrate another example of how consolidating tools in Rippling has helped Emotive save time and headaches. 

“I had a manager overseeing customer success, but we moved her into onboarding. Those are very different line items—one is cost of goods, and one is sales and marketing,” he said. “That’s a major department change, and because we didn't have Rippling, for months, everything was being misclassified. That's a 10-hour cleanup job. Had we had Rippling, her role change would have been automatically reflected, so the rules that we have going into QuickBooks would have automatically had all of her spend and cards start flowing properly into the right category.”

At the end of the day, having everything in one place was the primary allure. [We’re] working within one system instead of merging them. With SVB, we'd have to pull our bank statement here, pull this statement here, pull that statement there. Whereas now, we go directly into Rippling and see much, much more detail on what we're spending.

Will White

Emotive’s Chief Financial Officer

Eliminating manual work and consolidating tools into one platform helped Emotive work faster and more efficiently. But so did automating many of their once-manual processes with Rippling.

One example is meal reimbursements. Will said the Finance team handles around 50 reimbursements per week, which was once a huge time sink for their accountant. Now that they’ve used Rippling to automate reimbursements, they’ve reduced time spent by 75%. As the company grows, they’re looking for even more ways to save time by automating processes.

“With travel, it's a very similar process,” Will said. “We don't have a travel person. If we’re flying 50 people every month, then it would not be scalable for somebody to manage that—it would be wasteful to have a person spending so much time doing it. But with the rules engine, we can quickly set rules as guardrails, and then there are a lot of automations that you can do at scale. I could easily see that we'd rely more and more on the rules and automations as we scale.”

With all the time saved—both by automation and by closing the books faster than ever before— Emotive can now focus on value-adding work that drives business outcomes. 

“I won’t call it free time, but we have time. I could go into a bunch of very business-specific things that we fill our time with,” he said. “But the key thing is we’re moving into more impactful work: more process improvement, more time to build for tomorrow, instead of just fixing yesterday. That's what it’s let us do: We now have that window, where before it was one thing to the next.”

Payroll is probably a quarter of the time. It’s much easier to approve and review. It used to be two hours at the end of the month. Now it's under 30 minutes easily, so that's great.

Will White

Emotive’s Chief Financial Officer

• Faster financial reporting. “With Rippling, we have the closed-month reporting in the first week of the month as opposed to maybe the third week.”
• Better spend management, even with more corporate cards. “We're much more functional with our cards. We're issuing them out to more people and for more reasons.”
• 4x faster payroll. “Payroll is probably a quarter of the time. It’s much easier to approve and review. It used to be two hours at the end of the month. Now it's under 30 minutes.”