Philz Coffee case study

Philz Coffee case study

At a Glance

Accounting package:

Accountants love:

  • Corporate AMEX card feeds
  • Expensify's scalability with NetSuite

The best part:

  • Expense reporting process went from 3-4 days to 2-3 hours

Customer since: 2014

Mission: Happiness

From day one, Philz Coffee has had a simple goal filtered into its sophisticated coffee product: make people happy. Philz makes every effort to be immersed in its customer’s everyday lives, which has resulted in the brand experiencing rapid growth in a short amount of time.

Denys Altman, Accounts Payable/Accounts Receivable at Philz, explains that it was because of this substantial growth that the company decided to make the switch from its archaic pen-and-paper method for filing expense reports to a more streamlined approach. "Our company is growing at exponential rates, so the team needed an automated expense reporting system that could save us considerable time and resources." That’s where Expensify came in.

Sweeter with Netsuite

Expensify's easy connection with NetSuite reporting, Philz's accounting package of choice, was a huge selling point for the coffee brand to adopt the platform as their go-to expense management solution. "Before using Expensify, our accountants would have to sort through hundreds of line items and process the entire report by hand. Not only was this extremely tedious, but it was completely unscalable with our rapidly growing business."

Denys recalls that implementing the NetSuite accounting software with Expensify was extremely simple. The company began taking full advantage of the connection with NetSuite right away, exporting reports as journal entries for corporate card transactions, and easily creating expense reports for reimbursable expenses.

"Expensify has cut down our AMEX reconciliation time astronomically. What used to take three or four days to process now only takes two to three hours! Our employees are able to process their own reconciliation reports, which gives our accounting department valuable time back in their days to work on other tasks."

Philz Coffee shop employees behind the counter creating drinks
Overall, we love using Expensify because it's more efficient, more streamlined, and more well controlled for everyone involved. The platform is simple, clean, user-friendly, and looks better from an audit perspective.

Denys Altman

Head of Accounts Payable

Making the switch to Expensify

Initially, some employees were hesitant to make the jump to an unfamiliar platform. In order to help encourage making the switch from pen and paper, Philz implemented a standard procedural system to help onboard each employee to Expensify.

Denys and the accounting team were pleasantly surprised at how little time it took to actually onboard each employee: "Getting set up on Expensify was extremely easy. We only had a small learning process because the platform is so intuitive," Denys recalls. Now employees are completely sold on the platform and appreciate the faster ACH deposits and reimbursements.

Happy employees, happy customers

In addition to Expensify’s connection to NetSuite, the team was impressed by the automated tagging feature within the app, making it easy to break through layers of expense coding. Previously, the team had been assigning tags manually because their old system wouldn’t allow them to choose more than one label at a time. Now, the Philz team is able to appoint multiple tags for the classification and location of corporate expenses incurred from retail store supplies with ease.

Expensify has made life so much easier for both employees and our accounting department

"Overall, we love using Expensify because it's more efficient, more streamlined, and more well controlled for everyone involved. The platform is simple, clean, user-friendly, and looks better from an audit perspective," Denys says. "Expensify has made life so much easier for both employees and our accounting department. This means happier people overall, which has always been our goal in every aspect of our business."

Lindsey Peckham

A native Bostonian (with a 3-year stint in San Francisco in between), Lindsey now calls London home. She still prefers iced coffee over tea, but has a new soft spot for a Sunday roast. When she’s not working on marketing at Expensify, you’ll most likely catch her spending too much money at the local flower market.