Most companies invest in their employees’ well-being and health. After all, it makes good business sense: healthy workers work better. But wellness company Noom is especially cognizant of their staff’s health and happiness because spreading the messages of positive health and lifestyle choices is their speciality.
Noon has helped millions of American lose weight permanently by helping them change the ways they think about food and their lifestyles. As a result of its proven success, the company’s growth has skyrocketed ever since its founders had the idea to create an app that looked at the psychology of food and weight loss.
Although the rapidly expanding company now numbers its employees in the thousands, each and every one is given a generous monthly allowance for individual health and well-being spending. That’s in addition to many members of staff being given access to “traditional” expense accounts for daily, out-of-pocket accounting items.
As the company grew (it’s had several highly successful investment rounds at the time of writing), reconciling those monthly spends across the company started to become something of a burden. In fact, every expense item had to go through a six-step process before the spending was fully reconciled and reimbursed (where necessary). Google Sheets, email, API connectivity, manual approvals, and reckoning were all in the mix — a series of processes that simply wouldn’t have been efficient for, say, a ten-person startup. At the rate Noom was growing, monthly accounting practices were nearing a breaking point.
One of the company’s new hires – the Corporate Controller heading up FP&A, Marc Balcke — trialed a couple of Divvy accounts for himself and just a few others to see how the expense management system panned out in practical terms. After all, the service was free to him personally and to Noom as a company (Divvy is funded by taking a cut of merchants’ fees on its card purchases).
Marc said, “I had nothing to lose except my own time […] And so for me to be able to experiment with a couple of credit cards—at no cost for the company—to see if it actually works for our use cases, was a very easy and simple way to onboard and take these kinds of risks.”
After a very quick onboarding, the differences before and after became apparent. Instead of month-long waits for reconciliation and paper receipts being chased around the office, spends appeared immediately under allocated budget headings, and data accrued could be used to start predicting and ring-fencing budgets.
The cards Marc referred to take the form of a standard plastic card or a virtual, smartphone-based payment card. In either case, employees capture expense payment details on their phone’s app, and the information goes straight into the accounts department’s systems.
The trial quickly turned into a Divvy rollout across the company. Now Noom has issued a Divvy card (or virtual card) for every employee, paired with a user-friendly mobile app. Reimbursements are submitted directly in the app, and budgets adjust in real-time.
There was an immediate shift away from a growing mound of regular, manual reconciliation for the accounts professionals. “All of our transactions are actually occurring live in our system, and we can actually see and monitor the spend of the company as a transaction flows through the credit card instantaneously,” Marc says.
There’s no paper chase, lost receipts, or issues around approval delays for out-of-pocket expenses. Every staff member in every department benefits from the ease of the Divvy platform — and it’s all at zero cost to the company and the people at its heart.
Supporting its employees in the same ways that Noom helps its clients is a vital part of the company’s ethos and daily practice. Helping individuals remove stress and time-drains from their daily routines is what Noom does internally and externally.
We featured Divvy’s platform and how it works on these pages in a previous article. You can find out more about Divvy from the company itself, including how to open your own free Divvy account. Like Marc, your CFO has literally nothing to lose, and every employee has plenty to gain.
