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For small business retailers, no matter the season—whether you’re navigating summer sales, planning new product lines, or gearing up for back-to-school and even holiday planning—scaling your business is always a priority.

While meeting customer needs is essential, managing your business’ finances with the same focus is equally critical to success.

Without the right financial operations process in place, it can be challenging to manage the growth of your retail business while also ensuring control and visibility of your cash flow.

How to Grow Your Business through Spend & Expense Management

Optimizing cash flow is a game changer for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that want to stay ahead of the competition. Better business decisions can come from better insights into your cash flow.

As your business grows, you need full visibility into your evolving budgets and how your team is spending. Spend and expense management is the process of controlling those budgets, allocating resources, and tracking all spending across your business.

By leveraging technology like BILL Spend & Expense, an all-in-one expense management solution that combines free software with corporate cards*, you can get real-time visibility and customizable control over your business finances.

10 Retail Businesses Crack the Code on Spend and Expense Management

These 10 SMBs  cracked the code on spend and expense  management.

Follow their stories for greater profitability through technology and digital transformation.

Marine Layer Embraces Up To Date Expense Reporting

Some businesses use corporate cards for expenses, and that works fine. Unless, of course, it leaves you uncertain about how much your employees have spent over a given period.

Marine Layer, a casual retail apparel brand focusing on custom-developed fabrics, faced this problem. Employees sometimes took weeks to report expenses, making it harder to plan.

Today the California retail brand with 47 locations and 300 employees uses BILL Spend & Expense to streamline their business spending, which saves the team at least three to four hours per week on expense management.

“BILL gives us more up-to-date expense reporting,” says Kelly Ransom, Financial Accountant at Marine Layer. “And it automatically codes to the accounts that we want, so I don’t have to check and code each expense to make sure it’s going to the right place.”

Enlightened Equipment Seeks Protection from Fraud Risk

The right spend and expense tool also helps protect your business from fraud risk.

Tim Marshall founded Enlightened Equipment in 2007 working alone in his basement. The company makes quilts, clothing and accessories out of a 50,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Winona, Minnesota and now employs 75 people.

But the company faced issues connected to relationships with its vendors. Enlightened Equipment’s Director of Finance, Jessica Sonnek, explains:

“We had so many issues with fraud because of our wide range of vendors. And a lot of our transactions are online. There are just so many holes and so many people who have access to that credit card information.”

When fraud was suspected, fixing the problem was overly complicated, Sonnek said.

“We had to cancel the debit card, order another one, wait for it to come in the mail. Even just canceling the card was a 20-minute phone call.”

Then the company started using BILL Spend & Expense.

“In two keystrokes, it’s done. We went from 20 minutes to only seconds to process a dispute with BILL,” Sonnek says.

“Plus, they have a designated virtual card for each vendor to limit their exposure. When there is a problem, it only takes me 30 seconds to set up a new BILL card for one vendor, instead of having to get a new card number out to 50 different vendors.”

Golden Ratio Gets Budget Insights and Credit Control

Bad coffee while on the road made musician Clark Nowlin’s stomach turn. So he created Golden Ratio, a brand of light, low-acid coffee that’s easier on a coffee drinker’s insides.

The company saw $800K in transactions in the beginning of their business. So Nowlin and his team needed a way to have credit control and on-demand budget insight.

Enter BILL Spend & Expense. Golden Ratio and their team now have   the ability to control credit limits at the individual level and monitor spending on a dime without banks, credit cards, or mistakes.

A key benefit of using BILL Spend & Expense is the ability to maintain a controlled budget in one place, which allows the company to focus on more strategic tasks   like compliance, timelines, and production schedules to keep serving their 10,000+ clients. It also helps the company focus on expanding their product lines.

iROCKER Handles Expense Management in a Flash

iROCKER specializes in making inflatable paddle boards more fun in the water. But the company’s team felt the expense management system from their local bank was unenjoyable.

“I’d personally waste 10 or 20 hours a week trying to manage the system,” says iROCKER’s Controller Jeri Behnam. “Adding users and getting cards were both really challenging processes. There were no virtual cards – if you wanted one, you would order a physical card and someone would hide it in their desk. It wasn’t very safe or controlled but there was no other option.”

So when the company switched to BILL Spend & Expense, the new expense management system really made a big splash.

“It’s easy to turn a card on in a flash,” Behnam says. “It’s easy to turn it off. It’s easy to assign budgets. It’s easy to sync to NetSuite. I have no complaints. We’re very, very happy with BILL Spend & Expense. And we’re obviously saving all that time that I would waste on the old system – maybe 20 or 30 hours trying to handle the backend.”

Repurpose Reclaims  Employees’ Time with AI and Automation

You hear how time is money. See just how true that is with Repurpose.

The California-based company manufactures plant-based compostable products like plates, picnicware, toilet paper, and trash bags as plastic alternatives.

These efforts prevented 3.5 million pounds of waste from winding up in landfills so far.

And now Sarah Sanders, Vice President of Accounting at Repurpose wants to eliminate waste of her employees’ time as well.

Sanders claims the AI capabilities from BILL have saved her five-person financial team two days out of every work week. That amounts to roughly 100 days saved annually.

“The AI pulls all the information for you and it makes it so much easier,” Sanders says. “You just review. It’s easier to cross-reference than to actually key everything in.”

But BILL helps Repurpose fulfill its mission in another way too. The company offers a paperless finance solution. As Sanders explains: “The less paper we use, the better I feel about the job we are doing to serve our overall green mission. Our primary mission is to reduce plastics in our environment, but we also like to protect our forests.”

Glamnetic Gets a Financial Makeover  in the Blink of an Eye

Ann McFarren started her magnetic eyelash and press-on nail company from her Los Angeles apartment.

Today Glamnetic dominates the industry as a global multi-million dollar brand. Their products can be found in Sephora, Ulta, Kohl’s and other national retailers.

But hypergrowth can come with challenges. One of them is to constantly have to manage millions of dollars tied up in inventory and accounts receivables.

Fortunately the company’s financial team possesses a set of tools to perfectly meet the challenge.

In April 2022, Glamnetic began using BILL Spend & Expense to keep track of all spending.

Mayra Jimenez, Assistant Controller at Glamnetic, explains the benefits.

“Being able to track your spend, create budgets for departments or team members, get instant notifications about expenses and transactions, and upload receipts all on BILL Spend & Expense keeps things really organized. It just really makes for an organized cash-spending platform.”

aboutGOLF Simplifies their Game by Digitizing Accounts Payable and Spend Management  

Play less like Happy Gilmore and more like Arnold Palmer using a premium golf simulator to practice.

aboutGolf sells golf simulation software and hardware for entertainment and leisure venues, and in-home use throughout the US. The simulators provide versions of hundreds of golf courses including some champion level selections.

And when it comes to accounts payable and spend management, too many different systems can lead to duplicated work and wasted time.

Switching to BILL Accounts Payable and BILL Spend & Expense got the company out of the rough and onto the green. And BILL integration with Oracle NetSuite proved to be the final piece of the puzzle.  Paying bills is much easier for aboutGOLF as the team is now able to reduce their time spent on AP by up to 75%.

PolyStone Planters Looks for Solutions Rooted in Automation

PolyStone Planters sells planters made of innovative materials that make them lightweight and ideal for DIY gardeners at major retailers like Lowe’s, Home Depot, Amazon, Walmart, Houzz and Wayfair.

Despite their success, PolyStone Planters needed to automate their financial management – especially to track expenses to keep up with their rapid growth.

“We’ve got our audit trail all there, and it’s nice and tidy and thoroughly documented,” says Bert Stouffer, CEO and Managing Partner at PolyStone. “I feel like we are able to very cleanly track all the expenses that we have,”

The move also meant greater efficiency, reducing the time they spent processing advertising expenses by 75%. Company accountant Karen McCubbin explains.

“Before I started, they would print manual paper checks, and the person who did AP would drive to the owner’s house to have him sign checks. Then they would take them to the post office and mail them. Driving 45 minutes to have someone sign a check is a serious problem!”

Vermont Flannel Creates a Fabric of Success with Better Expense Management

Vermont Flannel focuses on the quality of their flannel clothes. That means eliminating distractions like an inefficient back-office system. Company executives claimed expenses were once covered by simply writing a check, making real time tracking impossible.

“From an accounting standpoint, that’s just a black hole,” says Chief Financial Officer Colin King. “There wasn’t a good record of where the money actually went. We just had little sheets of paper where everybody would write the amounts they had spent.”

Fast forward to today with the adoption of BILL Spend & Expense. Now each store gets a card of its own for expenses. So tracking expenses becomes easy.

“I think BILL Spend & Expense is the best expense tracking system I have ever used,” says Michelle Vincent, Director of Merchandising and Inventory at Vermont Flannel. “It makes assigning spend to categories fun (if you can believe it!) and easy. I’ve used a few very tedious systems in my past and it took hours to finish an expense report. I would dread the deadline every time.”

Pillow Cube Seeks to Straighten Out Marketing Spending with a More Streamlined Approach

Pillow Cube created a product that aligns your spine while you sleep. And major expenses included marketing costs.

At first, the company simply racked up marketing expenses like Facebook ads on the owner’s credit card.

A new chief financial officer, Clark Bigler, changed all this. He brought in BILL Spend & Expense.  The new software made tracking expenses on marketing and advertising a breeze.

“BILL Spend & Expense makes it really easy to manage spending and you don’t have to be a watchdog trying to manage all of your accounts at once,” Bigler says.

By utilizing BILL’s more streamlined approach, Pillow Cube and their employees no longer lose sleep over where their spending is going.

In Conclusion

For growing businesses, leveraging innovative finance tools like spend and expense management is incredibly crucial in shaping your journey toward sustainability, scalability and success.

Managing your business finances efficiently can also help you plan for long-term success and adapt to the changing customer demands.

Are you ready to transform your finances to empower your retail business? BILL Spend & Expense can help you track, manage, and control your expenses in one place. BILL makes it easy to create budgets, track expenses, and plan for future costs, giving you a comprehensive overview of your financial health.

To find out more, visit Bill.com/Signup to start your risk-free trial.

*The Bill Divvy Corporate Card is issued by Cross River Bank, Member FDIC.

This article, “10 Retail Case Studies for Better Spend & Expense Management” was first published on Small Business Trends