Summary
Always striving to learn about new accounting apps, Caleb Jenkins helped implement Divvy for a client. He realized it was different because—unlike other fintech apps that “don’t know what they don’t know”—the Divvy platform has front- and back-end data for deeper insights about incomplete transactions.
The challenge
RLJ Financial Services is a tax, accounting, and financial advisory firm in California’s Central Valley. Leading RLJ’s outsourced business accounting services team, Caleb Jenkins has distinguished himself as both a Top 100 QuickBooks ProAdvisor and Top “40 Under 40” Accountant four years running (2016–2019).
Early in 2018, Caleb heard about Divvy, a new platform for spend and expense management. At the time, he was recommending Bento for Business, a prepaid debit card, to clients who wanted corporate cards with spending limits. He said, “I added Divvy to my repertoire of apps that I keep in the back of my mind for specific client needs.”
Later that year, one of Caleb’s church clients was looking for a way to simplify reimbursements. Their process involved capturing receipts with Receipt Bank, creating expense reports, publishing to Bill.com, getting approvals, then actually reimbursing employees and volunteers.
Caleb realized “this was a great opportunity to try Divvy.” He said Divvy was easy to recommend because the platform was free, and the client could issue Divvy cards to everyone who spends. Once implemented, Divvy not only simplified reimbursements and expense reporting, it eliminated the need for both. As Caleb said, “That’s the beauty of Divvy in a nutshell.”
The solution
Soon after his first successful client implementation of Divvy, Caleb attended Scaling New Heights, an in-depth training conference for accountants, bookkeepers, and business advisors. While there, he visited the Divvy booth to report his client’s success.
“They showed me what they were doing with the platform,” Caleb said, “and I just had a lightbulb. I thought, this is amazing because you own the data from beginning to end and you can do powerful things with your software. It’s like Receipt Bank combined with American Express on steroids.”
Caleb had long been looking for a solution that could make incomplete transactions visible. “The problem with an app like Receipt Bank,” he said, “is that it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. But with Divvy, the data is there on the front end because you set up your budgets and categories first and have a dashboard for immediate visibility of all spending. Then, all you need to complete the transaction is a receipt—and that’s powerful.”
Since seeing Divvy in action at the conference, Caleb has become a member of the Divvy Advisory Council, providing expert guidance on the product roadmap. And, in addition to using Divvy to manage their own spending and expenses, RLJ has become a Divvy Partner. “We’re working to bring clients onto the platform,” Caleb said, “because we believe Divvy is a good tool for every business.”
The results
Asked about his favorite Divvy feature, Caleb said, “I love automatic notifications because they immediately push the workload out to people with knowledge of each expense rather than leaving people in the back office to figure everything out. It’s now much more difficult for cardholders to make excuses about not having a receipt or details because of automatic notifications on their device.”
He estimates it takes 10–15 seconds for cardholders to upload a receipt and categorize each transaction on the Divvy mobile app. He said that saves 30–60 seconds per transaction for his accounting team, and provides “complete and accurate data rather than incomplete, inaccurate data that we have to spend additional time fixing.”
Another timesaver for RLJ and their clients are Divvy virtual cards. When traditional credit cards are compromised, Caleb said banks sometimes allow recurring payments to continue on canceled cards. That leaves businesses with old account numbers they don’t know and can’t find. “The beautiful thing with a Divvy virtual card,” he said, “is that if it gets compromised, who cares? You turn it off and get a new one. It’s a streamlined process, which saves tremendous amounts of time.”
Touting the benefits the Divvy + QuickBooks Online integration, Caleb said that instead of dealing with duplicate transactions created by multiple credit card and receipt apps all publishing separately to QuickBooks, he now has a dashboard of incomplete, unsynced transactions, “so I know exactly what I need to work on.”
Beyond streamlining processes for clients, Divvy has also increased awareness at RLJ about internal spending. “Because we now require receipts, we’re actively making sure transactions are legitimate,” Caleb said. “We’re also watching what we spend, which has led to conversations about what we really need to spend.”
