Moving Beyond a Breaking Point: How Brex Found Their Cash & Close Management Solution with Numeric

Brex overview

Brex is the intelligent finance platform designed to help companies spend smarter and move faster. The platform combines global corporate cards, high-yield treasury, banking, expense management, bill pay, travel, and accounting with built-in AI to eliminate manual work for all employees and help finance leaders break the tradeoff between operational speed and financial control. 

The Challenge

Controller Kevin Moore joined as Brex’s first finance hire in 2017; as much as he had seen the company and accounting team successfully scale in volume and complexity, he had also watched a series of SaaS implementations stumble out of the gates. The enterprise ERP, HRIS and P2P solutions Brex implemented to support this growth all required significant investment from external consultants and years of continuous tinkering to get them to the desired level of functionality and user experience. And the close & reconciliation product they selected had become yet another enterprise tool that promised efficiency but delivered friction—so much friction that the tool was only being used by the handful of users who didn’t have an alternative solution in place.

Would another tool deliver on Kevin and the team’s desire to improve the flux analysis, close management, and bank reconciliation processes?

The numbers tell the story of the bank reconciliation process: 100+ bank accounts across over a dozen different banking providers, multiple entities, multiple currencies, and massive transaction volumes flowing through daily. For Moore and Sr. Accountant Kyle Gillingwater, a pleasant end game seemed like a fantasy.

Then entered Numeric.

When Enterprise Software Doesn't Quite Fit

Brex's bank reconciliation challenges began once they graduated from QuickBooks Online to NetSuite, only to realize NetSuite’s bank reconciliation capabilities were limited at the time. As a stop-gap,they implemented an additional SaaS tool that sat on top of their NetSuite instance that "got the job done" but couldn't scale with the company's explosive growth.

"We had system consolidation in mind, and we were thinking that there surely had to be an up-market system better suited to handle all our close management needs and scale," Kevin recalls. That enterprise solution was intended to support the month-end close checklist, flux analysis and reconciliations for bank and other balance sheet accounts. 

The implementation took months. The reality never quite matched the promise.

The pain points were numerous and persistent. In fact, most of the critical work eventually happened outside the system, in manually maintained Google Sheets that required constant updating and distribution across the accounting team. Beyond that, the lack of automation meant the offshore team spent their days manually matching bank lines to GL lines—work that should have been automated but wasn't.

How Numeric Won Brex Over: Building a Bank Rec Solution Together

Brex had already been using Numeric to manage much of their close accounting workflows: the team immediately loved using Numeric’s checklist, and the flux analysis tool, with its intuitive AI function, worked exactly as they had hoped. The final hurdle between being fully integrated with Numeric and clinging to the legacy system was Brex’s bank reconciliation process.

Brex’s co-development of a product with Numeric was atypical as far as vendor relationships go. Gillingwater was providing real Brex data, identifying pain points, and working alongside Numeric's engineering team to build something that could actually solve the problems they were previously unable to address.

The collaboration expanded far beyond just reconciliation matching. Through these conversations, the project evolved into a comprehensive cash module that addressed multiple pain points:

• Automated bank integrations that eliminated the 30-90 day connection timelines
• AI-powered transaction matching that could handle Brex's volume and complexity
• In-platform collaboration that eliminated the need for external Google Sheets
• Intuitive rule building that Kyle's team could configure themselves
• Real-time visibility for the broader accounting team

The collaboration was remarkably responsive. "We could message them, email them, hop on a call with them, and within 24 to 48 hours, they were pushing a prototype to us to see if this fit what we needed," Kyle recalls. "This wasn’t just about winning our business. It was about creating a product that truly met our complex needs and high standards."

When Brex's payroll manager—not an accountant by trade—provided feedback on a feature, Numeric shipped the change within a week. Her reaction: "I didn't realize they could move that fast!" She had been hesitant to even provide feedback, assuming changes weren't possible and that she'd just have to adapt to the new system. The quick turnaround was a pleasant surprise—unlike her previous experiences with enterprise SaaS solutions.

Trading Offshore Pains For In-house Gains: A Matching Breakthrough

The transformation in Brex's bank reconciliation process has been dramatic. Where the offshore team once spent entire shifts manually matching transactions, Numeric's robust rule builder and matching logic handles the bulk of the work automatically. Our offshore team’s manual match rate dropped from proposing 70% of all matches, down to less than 20% of all matches in just our first month of using Numeric. Less than half the number of hours are required to perform the same amount of work.

"Their rule building is very intuitive and simple to set up, easy for us to train," Kyle explains. "The visibility of what it actually is doing is readily apparent, so we know if it's functioning as intended or not."

Numeric's cash module has also enabled real-time assignment and notifications across the broader team. When a transaction needs attention, the system notifies the right person immediately—no more manual Google Sheet updates and tagging in separate systems.

For Kyle, the months since launching Numeric's cash module have been transformative: "The months that we've been reconciling in Numeric have been the months I've spent the least amount of time investigating variances in our cash accounts. What took us days now only takes us a few hours.” 

And perhaps most importantly, the entire accounting team genuinely enjoys working within Numeric, tinkering with updates, and adding new customization and automation where they can.

"Everyone on the team is in Numeric," Kyle confirms. "Everyone's been trained on and is leveraging the cash module for their work. People know how to use it, it's intuitive, it's connected with the other aspects of Numeric that we leverage. All in all, it's a much better fit for us."

Beyond Cash: The Close Foundation

Brex's relationship with Numeric extends across their entire close process; the bank recs feature was just the last piece of the puzzle. The journey followed a deliberate progression:

1. Starting with the checklist foundation
The team began with Numeric's close management checklist, migrating from a general project management tool. The checklist was incredibly low friction—easy to engage with, add new tasks, change deliverable dates, segment by financial area, and swap preparers/reviewers, all while supporting robust documentation/guides and links to their ERP.

2. Building confidence to go deeper
Successfully implementing the checklist gave the team confidence to invest in the Flux Analysis project, even with some inevitable change management.

3. Flux analysis delivers meaningful impact
The flux analysis succeeded thanks to great data visualization, real-time syncing with NetSuite, straightforward UI, and powerful filters and customization for setting response requirements. "In instances where the underlying data is relatively enriched, it is able to generate good quality responses without needing manual intervention. On a whole, it does the lion's share of the work for us," Stephanie Lau, GL Ops Manager, explains. "It gives an overall basis of what's changed, and then I just have to fill in the blanks. I don't have to write it out and type every single thing, or go back to last month and copy and paste."

4. AI capabilities accelerate the close
AI was "a cherry on top" at the time Brex implemented Numeric—no other company was offering this type of solution. Even if it was just hype that didn't work, they would have been happy. But now, because of Numeric’s AI, they’ve accelerated the completion of their flux analysis, helped them to ID errors and missing entries, and enabled faster sharing of results with Finance and Leadership.

In addition, the real-time NetSuite sync eliminates the need to download and manipulate NetSuite reports in static, offline spreadsheets. With Numeric, the team can reference that same data seamlessly and visualize it within the Numeric platform with ease. Director of Accounting Shao Li notes, "Numeric gives us a very helpful and meaningful user interface where it generates all the transactions at an individual transaction level in the same view, so you don't have to toggle back and forth."

The combination of checklist, flux, and cash reconciliation has supported the compression of Brex's close timeline from 6 business days to 4 business days—a 33% reduction and an amount that’s best-in-class for companies of Brex’s complexity.

Looking Ahead

For Kevin, the Numeric implementation stands out in stark relief against years of challenging enterprise software rollouts. "I think ultimately that implementing Numeric is one of the best decisions I've made as Controller over my 7 years at Brex," he reflects. "Improving workflows for accounting and finance teams is core to our mission at Brex, and it's been incredibly energizing to partner with such a like-minded company. There's no doubt Numeric has up-leveled our own accounting function."

Having conquered their bank reconciliations dilemma while elevating their existing close processes, the Brex team feels confident that Numeric will continue to be a great business partner to work with and grow together.