As a fast growing company, Noom was being slowed down by financial busy work. With BILL, they eliminated manual processes, got real-time visibility, and were able to focus on high-level priorities, such as forecasting budgets.

The challenge

Noom is a hyper-growth company that has gained popularity as a weight-loss service focused on lifestyle changes rather than restrictive dieting. The mobile wellness company has raised over seven rounds of funding, with a headcount that continues to scale. Up until recently, all of their financial services had been outsourced—and with over $250 million in revenue planned, this presented quite the challenge.

When Marc Balcke was hired as Noom’s first in-house corporate controller, he had a lot on his to-do list: hire a finance team, implement a range of expense software, and establish scalable financial processes for Noom. Unfortunately, much of Marc’s time was consumed by financial busy work—expense management, reimbursements, and budgeting.

Reimbursements were a nightmare of their own. Noom offers its employees a generous “wellness budget” to be used each month for mental and physical well-being. While the wellness results were optimal, the budgeting results were not. The reimbursement process involved a cumbersome, six-step process that passed back and forth between teams.

As Marc expanded his team, his corporate accountants lamented the messy paper trail, time-consuming manual processes, and lack of visibility. Lilly Wald explained, “The visibility into spend before BILL Spend & Expense would be the day we received a receipt from a credit card.”

While Marc was eager to streamline these processes with financial systems, he was worried about the time and training that traditional expense management would require. Luckily, he remembered a prior demo he’d received for BILL Spend & Expense.

“The visibility into spend before BILL Spend & Expense would be the day we received a receipt from a credit card.”

The solution

While a corporate card solution wouldn’t typically seem like the first priority, Marc realized that BILL Spend & Expense could address many seen and unseen challenges he was facing.

Best of all, he knew that the essential BILL Spend & Expense platform was free. Marc figured, “I had nothing to lose except my own time I would invest in that process. And so for me to be able to experiment with a couple of credit cards—at no cost for the company—to see if it actually works for our use cases, was a very easy and simple way to onboard and take these kinds of risks.”

See why Marc decided to try out BILL Spend & Expense when he moved to Noom.

Marc noted that BILL Spend & Expense was unique in this regard: “If I would have selected any of [BILL Spend & Expense’s ] competitors, it would have taken months of negotiation for the contract. We would have an implementation team and we might spend a year or more to implement it worldwide.”

To test Marc’s theory, he and his team completed a brief pilot run with BILL Spend & Expense. In no time, they were ready to say goodbye to Google Forms for good and focus on other high-level priorities.

“The fact that the BILL Spend & Expense platform was for free, I had nothing to lose except my own time I would invest in that process.”

The first thing Marc and his team did was utilize BILL Spend & Expense budgets. Marc explained that this sparked some “healthy conversations” about the budgeting process and allowed them to compare forecasts to the actual transactions flowing through BILL Spend & Expense.

Lilly Wald was encouraged by this kind of real-time visibility. She explained, “Now that we know how much we’re giving each employee to spend we’re able to forecast budgets months in advance.” This just wasn’t something they were able to do previously.

At a previous company, Marc had felt the burden of paper receipts and reports. He said that they would sometimes have “tens of thousands of dollars of receipts that were six months old and none of us [in finance] would know about them.” Using BILL Spend & Expense at Noom, he says he “won’t have to be afraid of that anymore….It’s going to make our internal processes a lot more efficient.”

“Now that we know how much we’re giving each employee to spend we’re able to forecast budgets months in advance.”

The results

Finally, all card spend in one place. Since implementing BILL Spend & Expense, Marc’s team has abandoned Google Forms and saves dozens of man-hours a month. Noom has a BILL Divvy Card powered by Visa* for every single employee, paired with a user-friendly mobile app. Reimbursements are submitted directly in BILL Spend & Expense and budgets got a whole lot easier to manage.

“Most importantly,” says Marc, “all of our transactions are actually occurring live in our system, and we can actually see and monitor the spend of the company as a transaction flows through the credit card instantaneously.”

With BILL Spend & Expense, Noom’s finance team can gain real-time insights and trends into company spend. Lilly explains how well this aligns with Noom’s values, “Two of Noom’s principals are to 1) be transparent and 2) to think like an owner. I think BILL Spend & Expense really allows the employees to see how money is being spent—especially the budget owners”

Lilly talks about how BILL Spend & Expense empowers Noom’s employees.

“With BILL Spend & Expense, we have the advantage of having all of the spend in one place. ”

BILL Spend & Expense has transformed the way Marc and his team work--and it's benefitted other departments as well.

Lost paper no more

La Leurentop, the office manager, described how differently her job looks—on a daily basis—now that they’re using BILL Spend & Expense.

Some days, La has to zig-zag all over the city doing everything from space-planning to picking up birthday cake. That kind of hustle and bustle is the enemy to expense tracking. For La, that unfortunately meant “lost pieces of paper.”

BILL Spend & Expense has relieved that pressure for La and others in the office: “A particular problem that BILL Spend & Expense has helped me solve is simply the ability to snap a photo [of a receipt] on my phone and upload it right away. I think that having the mobile app is extremely valuable”

*The BILL Divvy Card is issued by Cross River Bank, member FDIC, and is not a deposit product.