Lehi startup launches platform to manage business expenses
Blake Murray, founder and CEO of Divvy, a secure financial platform for businesses, poses for a portrait at Divvy's Lehi office on Monday, Dec. 11, 2017.
Visualization of the Divvy expensing platform system.
An example of the Divvy mobile platform and a Divvy credit card for company expenses.
“I’ll Google it.”
There are only a few company names that have become verbs. One Lehi company, Divvy, is hoping to join that elite group.
Founded in 2016, Divvy is a secure software as a service financial platform for businesses. Divvy automates a company’s entire expense report process, and helps companies eliminate fraud and wasteful spending. It also manages payments and spending for the company’s online subscriptions.
“I’ve always been frustrated with my companies, in part, because there were no tools readily available to see how your company is doing right now. We have the sales view, but I wanted to see our true performance,” said Blake Murray, Divvy founder and CEO.
Murray said there was always a lag time on the costs of doing business — the expense reports, monthly expenses and other spending.
“That never made sense to me. We’re working off reactive information. But software is better than that. So I thought, I’ll go build that company,” Murray said.
The Divvy platform easily displays this information, showing who spent the money, why it was spent, and who approved it, all in real time.
“Divvy has changed my work life. I used to spend a large portion of my days trying to find employees and get them to either file their expense reports or explain charges to me,” said Travis Landry, CFO of Friendemic, in a press release about Divvy. “But now I can actually focus on my core job — helping my company scale.”
Murray pointed to information from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners explaining the average company loses 5 percent of its revenue every year to fraud and abuse. The latest study found illegitimate expenses cost businesses a median of $30,000.
“We created Divvy to give business owners a proactive way to manage their employees’ spending habits, effectively helping them spend smarter, while reducing the risks of fraud and wasteful spending. When given context and relevant data, we tend to make better decisions. Divvy puts this data front and center which improves decision making, ensures budgets are adhered to and provides the real reward, automated expense reports,” Murray added.
Additionally, Divvy users can also set up budgets, in line with the company’s overall operating budget. In this way, Murray said, employees can see their spending in real time as well. An additional feature of Divvy is the ability to generate physical or virtual credit cards only usable for specific transactions, or as Murray explained, “on a one-to-one basis.”
This, he said, protects the company from hacking attacks, as the card is tied only to one fund, which has a limited spending cap, and can only be spent for the item it is assigned to. For example, a company’s monthly payments to Hubspot or an internet service provider would each have their own individually assigned credit card numbers. Or a business could use one virtual card to pay multiple vendors.
It also does not matter which bank the company uses, because the Divvy platform acts like Venmo, becoming that linking space to funnel transactions through. Murray hopes Divvy will be the Venmo for businesses.
“It’s as fast, or faster than Venmo to use,” Murray said.