With a team of 30 employees and operations across the US, Givebacks had just one person handling bookkeeping, accounting, and HR: Annie Fehm, Director of People Operations. As a one-person people and finance team, she was struggling to cobble together multiple platforms and manual processes that made workflows painfully slow.

“It was just cumbersome and tedious,” Annie explained.

Annie was using Gusto for payroll, Brex to issue corporate cards, and Excel spreadsheets (with a template) to manually process expense reimbursements. It all added up to a lot of manual tasks—issuing, managing, and reconciling corporate cards—plus a cumbersome expense reimbursement process with tons of emailing back and forth.

“There was an expense reimbursement template in Excel that was set up before I joined the company, and they were still using that,” Annie explained. “Everyone had a copy of it. If anyone had an expense reimbursement, they would send me the spreadsheet. Invariably, I would have to go back and ask them to attach receipts. Then I had to go to the CEO to get it approved, and then enter it manually in payroll. There were a lot of back-and-forths. It was very cumbersome and manual.”

Annie estimated that she spent about 20 minutes per reimbursement, not counting email response time, which could be 24 hours or more when waiting for CEO approval for expenses. Not only was the lack of integration and automation causing inefficiencies, but it regularly delayed reporting and reduced visibility into the company’s financials.

Annie was first drawn to Rippling as a payroll provider to replace Gusto, attracted by the ability to use her own benefits broker—something Gusto didn’t offer. But as she was signing on for payroll, she realized Rippling could do much more for Givebacks. 

In addition to implementing Rippling for payroll, Annie signed up for Rippling Spend Management, too, seeing a way to streamline her existing tech stack and combine multiple tools into one.

We went to Rippling to bring a lot of things together into one platform.

Annie Fehm

Director of People Operations at Givebacks

“The biggest factor for us was just having it all in one place,” Annie said.

In addition to payroll, Rippling Spend Management could handle corporate cards—with a more streamlined process for creating roles—and department-based rules and policies that Annie knows will be useful as Givebacks continues to grow. So they moved their card spending over from Brex to Rippling. Annie soon realized another opportunity: Rippling could also help Givebacks manage device inventory, allowing them to securely order and manage their employees’ devices from the same platform.

On top of lightening Annie’s administrative load, Givebacks’ CEO loves that so many workflows are now combined in one platform. It’s given the C-suite better visibility into different processes and helps them make more data-driven decisions.

“We’re a small team, and we’re not fully staffed on the admin side,” Annie said. “It’s really helpful for me personally in terms of managing payroll, hiring, inventory—you know, having everything in one place. It also gives direct visibility to my C-suite. So my CEO and my COO can go in and see exactly what I’m doing and what’s in there. I’ve had great feedback about the expense reimbursement tool. My CEO is very happy.”

But the biggest value came from Rippling Spend Management’s ability to eliminate Givebacks’ inefficient, spreadsheet-based expense reimbursement process.

Spreadsheet templates, manual approvals, and back-and-forth emails are now a thing of the past for Givebacks’ expense reimbursements, thanks to Rippling’s Expense Management. Moving Givebacks’ reimbursement process into Rippling allowed Annie to completely eliminate manual spreadsheets—an impactful change that saves her both time and a lot of headaches. Now, instead of spending 20 minutes per reimbursement on approvals—plus waiting for email responses from the CEO—she said processing time is down to zero.

“Approvals don’t come through me, and I don’t have to manually enter them in payroll because that happens automatically,” she said. “I still review reimbursements, but now it’s just a glance to make sure nothing’s out of line. Other than that, it takes no time.”

Moving to Rippling improved Givebacks’ employee experience by making expense management a much more user-friendly process—no one misses the old way of using Excel templates. And now that payroll and benefits are personalized, Givebacks is poised to attract top talent as it continues to grow.

Annie said Rippling has helped put Givebacks in a much better position to scale up. There are still more features, like Rippling’s robust finance reporting, that Givebacks hasn’t tapped into—but she can see being useful in the future.

With so much administrative work now taken off her plate by streamlining workflows and automating processes, Annie has been able to pivot to work that directly impacts Givebacks’ ability to grow and scale.

“I’ve been lucky to spend more time planning—to roll out more people programs like performance management, training, education, learning and development, things like that,” she said. “It’s freed me up to focus on those things—solving problems as opposed to just reporting and doing administrative work.”

• Time saved: With Rippling Spend, Givebacks spared hours—often days—processing and chasing down approvals for expense reimbursements.
• Consolidated systems: Givebacks folded three disparate systems for payroll, corporate cards, and expense reimbursements into an all-in-one platform
• Staying lean: With Rippling Spend, one admin can handle finance and HR for a 30-person workforce—while retaining time to focus on strategic initiatives.