Honeylove wanted to control costs while empowering its workforce to make necessary business purchases, but a piecemeal spend management process slowed the company down. 

The women’s shapewear and intimates brand used American Express to administer corporate cards and Abacus to both approve expenses and reconcile receipts. “It was a really bad workflow with the old system,” said Austin Chang, Honeylove’s Controller, who explained that employees and managers alike lost time toggling between the two solutions to upload and review receipts. “Everyone complained about it. But they lived with it because they thought it was the only system they could use.” 

Even within their silos, the separate systems created headaches. It took department heads weeks to resolve disputed AmEx charges. And Abacus didn’t allow Honeylove’s finance team to customize approval chains based on vendor amounts. 

Honeylove needed a better, unified spend management system.

As the Director of Accounting at his prior employer, Austin was an avid user—and fan—of Rippling. After seeing how dismayed Honeylove was with the status quo, he convinced executives to consolidate corporate card management, approvals, and receipt reconciliation under a single platform: Rippling Spend.

Honeylove now uses the same platform to issue corporate cards, review transactions, and serve as a repository for all receipts in case of audits or unauthorized charges. The streamlined process makes it easier for the finance team to track and review expenses. 

“There’s another level of accounting control with Rippling,” Austin said, appreciating how the system lets employees easily send and receive screenshots of receipts and provide documentation to explain the reasons for their purchases. 

And unlike Abacus’s single-person approval workflows, Rippling allows Honeylove to automatically route approvals to different, customizable reviewers based on the dollar amount. This way, executives can monitor big-ticket purchases, all while ensuring employees don’t get held up making smaller payments. “With all the permissions set up, we can really fine-tune who can access what,” Austin said.

According to Austin, thanks to the enhanced control with Rippling, “I think employees became a little more cautious about what they buy.”

There’s another level of accounting control with Rippling.

Austin Chang

Controller at Honeylove

Rippling also improved Honeylove’s ability to monitor fraudulent charges. Under the previous system, the company’s finance team manually reconciled expenses one by one and could only sync transactions to its general ledger monthly due to long email and Slack back-and-forths whenever numbers were off. 

With Rippling’s automated workflow, Honeylove now syncs with its accounting system daily, ridding the need for any manual data entry. “We can validate the charge to see if it’s legit or not,” Austin said. “And if we need to dispute, we can dispute right away.”

Austin also said disputing corporate card charges is easy with Rippling. With AmEx, department heads (whose names were typically on the company cards) had to investigate who made the unauthorized charge, call the card company themselves to dispute the charge, and typically only resolve the dispute a month after the charge. “It was a very tedious process,” Austin said. But since Rippling allows Honeylove to sync transactions daily and quickly follow up with employees about out-of-policy charges, the company now resolves disputes within a few days.

Honeylove’s entire workforce benefited from Rippling’s intuitive, unified system. Executives appreciate the cost savings from consolidating systems and gaining better spend controls. Employees have an easier time sending receipts and justifying expenses. And accounting teams can mercifully unload the manual work involved in tying books out. 

Rippling also allows Honeylove to integrate finance processes with HR features across payroll, time and attendance tracking, onboarding, and more, giving employees one easy-to-use system instead of juggling multiple logins. 

“We moved onto Rippling because of the overall package,” Austin said. “And the spend system is very mature right now. It’s the peak of what you can get.”

Rippling is the peak of what you can get.

Austin Chang

Controller at Honeylove

• Time savings: With Rippling, Honeylove spends four hours less on reconciling expenses and resolves disputed transactions in a fraction of the time.
• Cost savings: Honeylove cut costs by consolidating systems.
• Better control: With Rippling’s automated approval workflows and daily accounting system syncs, Honeylove can better monitor and enforce responsible spend.