How the Joblift team grows with its challenges

With great growth comes ... great effort for expense management. Many startups share this experience once the founding phase is over. For online job exchange platform Joblift, it was all the same. Although the young HR platform prioritized a well-positioned finance team comparatively early on, it quickly became apparent: the existing expense solutions could not keep up with the company's rapid growth. Head of Finance Gerrit Kern reveals how Joblift uses Moss to master the increasing number of employee expenses and bring structure to financial management.

The challenges

Unlike many other startups, Joblift recognized early on how important a well-positioned finance team is for a company. At a time when other founders would still be managing their financial affairs on their own, the HR startup already counted efficient expense management among its priorities. As Gerrit recalls, "The challenge was to set up the finance team effectively so that the things that could be automated also will be automated. This way you can keep up and get everything done with a small team like ours as well." 

Receipts become a burden

The Joblift team initially decided to go with the classic option in terms of expenses, relying on corporate credit cards from a traditional bank. But even in the small team, difficulties appeared shortly. Reporting even the smallest employee expenses consumed an immense amount of time and very soon, all overview was lost. The "big chase" after receipts began. "There were a lot of question marks like ‘Which receipts are missing now?’, ‘Have they already been handed in?’. Then documenting all of them properly and ultimately booking them – it was a huge effort," says Gerrit, describing the problem that cost the team the most time.

And it wasn't just the finance team that was increasingly dissatisfied with the inefficient spending processes. The more payments were made, the harder it became to motivate the team to keep all receipts and submit them on time. The consequences: constant reminder emails, time-consuming "collecting" and ultimately a lack of overview of the expenses made.

Fast growth – slow processes

Gerrit and the Joblift finance team eventually realized that their existing expense solution would not be able to withstand the company's rapid growth for long. With increased sales and a growing team came increased expenses – and an even greater time commitment for employees and the finance team. "We then realized, okay, if we're going to grow even more – if we're going to increase both our revenue and our expenses – then we need a solution that makes it a little easier, automates the process, makes it more manageable, and then also gives us the ability to have a better overview of the costs."

"We realized: okay, if we continue to grow [...] we just also need a solution that makes the whole thing a little easier for us."

In short, the missing component was a scalable spend management solution that could help the Joblift team automate spend and approval processes, as well as give the finance team a better overview of all costs.

The solution

Joblift started looking for a suitable tool and in the end chose Moss, becoming one of their very first customers. "When Moss was still called Vanta," Gerrit recounts. "Of course, we also considered whether we should take a tool that had been on the market for years – or whether we should give it a go with ‘the young, wild’ system. So far, we haven't regretted our decision in any way."

Quick and easy changeover

When it came to onboarding, the Joblift team was prepared to take things slowly and ease the team into the transition to Moss, to not put any pressure on employees. Thanks to the simple set-up and the immediately noticeable improvement in spending processes, the switch did turn out to be quite quick: within the first two months with Moss, Gerrit and his team canceled all existing bank cards and started issuing more and more virtual credit cards with Moss, Gerrit and his team canceled all existing bank cards and started issuing more and more virtual credit cards with Moss. The team was particularly excited by "the fact that credit was now available much more easily and quickly, and cards could be created for individual payments – especially the virtual credit cards."

Onboarding was made even easier by the quick clarification of uncertainties and the flexibility of Moss' software features. Feedback from Joblift was implemented quickly, and features were released short-term. As a result, Moss was able to help the startup iron out issues with its spend processes from the outset, addressing the company's specific pain points – or as Gerrit sums it up, "I've never felt so well looked after as I do with Moss!"

Throwing off burden and moving forward at full throttle

After only a short time, Joblift's finance team achieved its goal. They now lead an efficient expense management automating all central processes and providing an overview of the costs incurred at all times. In particular, the simple receipt upload as well as the automatic receipt reminders result in enormous time savings for everyone involved: "The fact that we no longer have to chase after colleagues, but to have colleagues provide their receipts independently – it’s such a huge time saver and an incredible relief."

Joblift was thus able to streamline invoice management all the way and to save time when documenting and booking receipts. With automatic OCR scanning, Moss captures all relevant payment and booking data from the uploaded receipts and assigns them to the corresponding transaction. Gerrit and his team only have to check the read out data and, if necessary, add the cost center, cost object and VAT rate. If standardized values have already been defined for the merchant in question, however, this step would also be redundant. All the data then would be ready to be exported to the tax consultant, which can be done in Moss with just a few clicks via the integrated DATEV interface.

Well prepared for the future – with Moss

Like many other start-ups, Joblift quickly realized that inefficient expense processes are one of the biggest stumbling blocks for up-and-coming companies. With Moss, the Hamburg-based company has finally found a spend solution that can keep up with the fast pace of the tech industry and the dynamics of a young HR startup. "It's just also something that's really scalable," Gerrit enthuses. "I can imagine us still working with the same system when we have three times as many employees." 

"I can imagine us still working with the same system when we have three times as many employees."

While the former credit card solution was already leading to inefficient processes and massive time waste in a small team, Moss, with its adaptability and scalability, offers the certainty of never losing control even with rapid growth and became a reliable solution for the future: "It gives you a sense of security that Moss can be of great benefit to the company in many scenarios." This way, Joblift makes its expense management a secondary matter. And can fully concentrate on further revolutionizing digital recruiting.