Divvy Review: New Take on Expense Management

Managing expenses and budgets is a constant challenge for most businesses.

Divvy offers a new approach with capabilities to streamline the process and provide deeper insights to empower smarter decisions.

In this review, we'll evaluate Divvy's core features for building budgets, managing expenses, integration, and more to determine if it's the right solution to meet your business needs.

Introduction to Divvy

Divvy is a new expense management and budgeting platform designed to simplify financial processes for small and medium businesses. This article provides an overview of Divvy's key features and evaluates if it offers a worthwhile alternative for streamlining business budgeting.

Overview of Core Capabilities

Divvy aims to consolidate expense reporting, company spending oversight, budget management, and related financial operations onto a single intuitive platform. Key capabilities include:

• Centralized dashboard for real-time visibility into cash flow, spending, budget vs. actuals, and more
• Automated expense reporting with smart receipt capture
• Customizable budgets and insights to identify problem areas
• Bill pay automation and syncing with bank accounts
• Tools for creating detailed financial reports and forecasts

By centralizing these critical functions, Divvy intends to save finance teams time and provide greater control over budgets.

Key Strengths and Benefits

Divvy touts ease of use, custom reporting, intelligent insights, and automation as main value propositions for adopting its software.

Specific benefits include:

• Intuitive interface that minimizes training needed for employees
• Configurable workflows to match existing financial processes
• Interactive reporting with filtering and drill-downs
• Proactive budget alerts based on real-time spending data
• Time savings from streamlined expense reporting and approvals

For growing companies struggling with siloed financial data or manual workflows, Divvy aims to drive efficiency and transparency.

Pricing and Available Plans

Divvy offers three pricing tiers based on number of users and desired features:

• Budget - Basic expense management for 5 users
• Growth - Additional reporting and bill pay for 20 users
• Scale - Advanced insights and custom integrations for 50+ users

Exact pricing is not publicly listed, but Divvy offers custom quotes based on needs. They also provide 14-day free trials to test drive the software.

Implementation and Onboarding Process

Divvy focuses on making onboarding smooth via dedicated launch manager support and integration assistance. Typical setup takes 4-6 weeks and includes:

• Configuring connected bank accounts, credit cards, accounting systems
• Establishing approval workflows and report templates
• Training employees on mobile app and web portal access
• Testing integrations and validating data flows

Ongoing support is available along with free access to Divvy's large knowledge base and community forums.

Competitor Comparison

Compared to solutions like QuickBooks and Expensify, Divvy differentiates itself by consolidating financial management into a unified platform tailored for collaboration. It offers comparable features to these products in certain areas:

• Expense reporting - Divvy provides smart receipt capture and policy-driven approval workflows similar to Expensify.
• Accounting integration - Divvy syncs budget vs. actuals, invoices, and other data with QuickBooks Online and Xero.

However, Divvy goes beyond standalone capabilities to connect the dots between spending, reporting, planning, and analysis. Its focus is on real-time visibility, configurability, and workflows to unite finance teams.

For companies willing to adopt an end-to-end finance solution, Divvy aims to drive productivity and growth through easy-to-use tools designed for collaboration and insight.

Evaluating Divvy's Budget Management Capabilities

Divvy provides robust tools for building, tracking, and adjusting budgets to meet organizations' financial planning needs. Its intuitive interface and automation features simplify the budgeting process.

Intuitive Budget Building

Divvy makes creating budgets quick and straightforward. Users can:

• Build templates with custom categories and reporting lines
• Set budgets by month, quarter, or year with flexible date ranges
• Import historical data to auto-populate budget plans
• Leverage workflow automation for efficiency

These capabilities reduce the manual effort of assembling financial plans. The templates provide guardrails so employees create compliant, accurate budgets aligned to organizational standards.

Custom Reporting and Insights

Once budgets are set, Divvy delivers real-time analytics on:

• Budget versus actual spending
• Burn rates by period, category, department
• Anomalies, trends and projections

Visual reports provide transparency for tracking performance. Dashboard customizations fit data to decision makers' information needs. This empowers data-driven actions to achieve targets.

Flexible Control and Adjustments

As business conditions shift, Divvy enables rapid budget changes through:

• Streamlined approval workflows
• Automated variance reporting
• Simple budget reallocations and revisions
• Real-time synchronization across plans

These controls create agility in financial planning activities. Teams can quickly respond to new priorities and opportunities without disruption.

Ease of Adoption for Users

Divvy focuses on usability and intuitiveness in its interface designs. Key highlights include:

• Step-by-step guidance for new users
• Contextual help documentation
• Interactive walkthroughs of platform features
• Self-service access and permissions management

By minimizing the learning curve, Divvy allows a larger portion of staff to leverage its budgeting functionalities. Employees can be productive faster which maximizes value realization.

With robust budgeting capabilities, flexible real-time analytics, and easy adoption, Divvy provides a streamlined platform for organizations' financial planning and spending control needs. The tool simplifies critical processes while still allowing for customization, ensuring efficient and accurate budget management.

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Reviewing Expense Management Capabilities

Divvy provides an end-to-end expense management solution aimed at simplifying and automating key tasks for businesses. This section evaluates how effectively Divvy handles core capabilities like expense report creation, processing, oversight, and accounting system integrations.

Streamlining Expense Reports

Divvy enables employees to easily capture and submit expenses on-the-go using its intuitive mobile app. Key benefits include:

• Simple receipt capture: Employees can quickly snap photos of receipts rather than collect paper copies. Receipts are automatically parsed and matched with card transactions.

• Fast submission: Expenses can be submitted immediately after purchase rather than waiting to compile reports. Submission simply requires snapping a photo and adding details.

• Flexible workflows: Customizable automated routing rules route expense reports to managers based on parameters like employee, department, expense type, etc.

By simplifying reporting through automation and mobile capabilities, Divvy reduces manual data entry and creates faster reimbursement cycles compared to traditional spreadsheet-based approaches.

Intelligent Processing and Oversight

Divvy applies intelligent automation to streamline approvals and oversight of expense reports:

• Smart matching engine: Automatically matches expense line items with related transactions, receipts, GL codes, cost centers, etc.

• Configurable approval flows: Administrators can set up conditional, multi-step approval chains based on spend policies.

• Anomaly detection: Flags unusual spending patterns for review, such as duplicate charges or spend outside expected ranges.

This enables managers to focus reviews on high-risk or high-impact expenses while routine spending gets automatically approved based on policy compliance.

Enabling Company Card Management

For organizations that utilize company credit cards, Divvy centralizes administration and oversight:

• User and card management: Admins can easily open, update, or cancel cards associated with cardholders.

• Custom spend controls: Apply configurable spend limits and restrictions per user or department.

• Transaction-level visibility: Real-time reporting provides details on merchant, location, spend category, and more for all card purchases.

Divvy provides unified visibility and control for company card programs of all sizes. Its flexible controls and real-time reporting help mitigate risk while enabling efficient oversight.

Integrating with Accounting Systems

Divvy integrates bi-directionally with leading small business accounting platforms like QuickBooks Online and Xero to enable seamless financial workflows:

• Automated sync: Expenses from Divvy automatically sync to the accounting system as approved.

• Reconciliation and reporting: Charges and payments sync from the accounting system back to Divvy for centralized reporting.

• GL coding: GL codes from the accounting system integrate with Divvy for automatic categorization.

By connecting the spend management and accounting processes, Divvy provides accurate financial reporting and reconciliation without manual duplication of data or effort.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Summary of Pros and Cons

Divvy offers several key benefits for businesses looking to optimize their expense management:

• Automates expense reporting, saving time and hassle
• Provides real-time visibility into cash flow and spending
• Enables custom budgeting features to control costs
• Integrates with accounting software and bank accounts

Potential downsides to consider:

• Monthly subscription fees can add up for larger teams
• May require training and adjustment period to onboard employees
• Lacks some advanced features of higher-end systems
• Reliant on consistent user adoption and input for full value

Ideal Customer Profiles

Divvy works best for these types of businesses:

• Small to mid-sized companies with 5-100 employees
• Companies with high volumes of expenses and reimbursements
• Startups seeking an all-in-one financial solution
• Companies without a current expense management system

Businesses needing advanced accounting capabilities may require a more robust platform.

Implementation Best Practices

To maximize the impact of Divvy:

• Set clear expense policies and communicate to employees
• Train all users thoroughly on Divvy features and workflow
• Integrate Divvy with key software like payroll, accounting, etc.
• Analyze reports frequently and tweak budgets to optimize spending
• Encourage employee adoption through executive sponsorship

Following best practices for change management and user onboarding is key to realizing Divvy's full value.

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