How to automate expense management in Striven

Key takeaways

• Striven brings bank and credit card transactions in through Online Banking, powered by Yodlee, and records card spend as Credit Card Charges.
• Match with Vendors assigns a vendor and expense account, and can default that account for next time.
• Employee Expenses handles out-of-pocket claims, with Expense Types, an approval queue and reimbursement checks.
• Vergo proposes account and class from your history and posts coded entries once your admin enables API access.

Where should you go next?

• Vergo's Striven integration
• What expense management software integrates with Striven?
• Get started with Vergo

How do you automate expense management in Striven, step by step?

1. Enable the API. Your Striven admin enables API access once; Vergo then posts coded card spend as journal entries and reimbursements as employee-as-vendor bills.
2. Connect your existing cards. Connecting your existing cards involves no card applications, no re-issuing and no banking change.
3. Collect receipts by text. Field staff and project managers reply with a photo; employees handle everything by text message — no app to download, no portal login — and Vergo chases missing receipts itself instead of waiting for a report.
4. Code each line. Vergo proposes the GL account and class, and notes where a charge belongs to a customer or sales order.
5. Post to Striven. The reviewed entry is posted, ready to reconcile against the card statement.

What does Striven track on spend?

• GL account from the chart of accounts.
• Class, where your company tracks classes.
• Customer and sales order, for spend tied to client work.
• Billable flag, so costs can be invoiced on.

Why does vendor matching only go so far?

Match with Vendors remembers an account per vendor, which works for a phone bill. It breaks on a hardware store or an online marketplace, where one vendor sells office supplies on Monday and client materials on Tuesday. Vergo reads the receipt itself, line by line, and predicts the GL account from what was actually bought, not just the vendor name on the header, and suggests the customer when your history shows similar purchases were billed.

A practical example

An IT services firm on Striven gives its field engineers company cards. One engineer buys a network switch for a client install and a lunch on the same card. Vergo texts for the receipt, proposes the switch to project materials with the client's sales order noted as billable, and the lunch to meals, following how prior installs were coded. The operations manager confirms and the entry is posted to Striven.

How Vergo handles this

Vergo proposes the coding by inference from your own accounting structure and history — no rule library to build, no keyword lists to maintain, and new vendors are coded on first sight. In Striven, that includes the class and billable choices your team made before, so client costs are not left for someone to catch at invoicing. Every coding shows why it was chosen, so a reviewer confirms in seconds instead of re-coding by hand. Approval workflows are optional and fit how you already control spend: route by GL account or by amount — or skip approval flows entirely and let policy flags catch only what breaks a rule.