At some point, it happens to every growing company. Your team is doing great work, moving fast, and spending on whatever the company needs. But somewhere between "go buy it" and "expensed," they hit a wall. Maybe it’s an unclear approval chain. Maybe it's a policy with gaps or a lost receipt. But somehow, your system, which was supposed to save time, is now creating more work.
Most products just add more processes to the problem. We wanted to build something that works for the whole team, designed for the person holding the card as much as the person approving purchases. Our answer is Mercury Spend — a unified system of intelligent budgets and self-enforcing expense policies built for scaling teams.
With Mercury, you can now issue stipends to your teammates for specific purposes (such as travel, software, home office setup, and supplies), so they always know exactly what they can spend on. As your team spends, we’ll automatically route transactions and expense reimbursements to the right budget based on what we know about each one, so your team can spend less time managing expenses and more time on more important stuff. You can even issue dedicated cards for agents to enable approved transactions and get granular visibility over every move.
Budgets make it easy to keep our spending disciplined without adding overhead. For a lean team, that's exactly what you want.
To help your team stay focused while keeping spending in check, we’ve automated the busywork of spending, so your team only needs to tap. We automatically categorize transactions to the right budget and streamline receipt uploads with automatic Gmail scanning and convenient text reminders for on-the-go submission. We’ve also introduced new policy settings to automatically lock cards with overdue tasks.Â
With Mercury, our team can buy what they need without slowing down or waiting for my approval. Receipts are handled automatically and spending policies enforce themselves.
Mercury Spend also saves your accounting and finance teams the hassle of manually matching details at month-end close. Transactions are automatically categorized to the right budget and category at the point of purchase, and admins can configure additional rules and automations behind the scenes to tightly control how every transaction feeds into their specific accounting system.
 As your team spends from Budgets, you can see a clear picture of how they’re tracking toward your total allotted spend from one place. And because Mercury already knows your cashflow and runway, your team’s spend connects to that picture from day one, without tacking on another tool to configure and connect, all while being able to track spend by card, team, vendor, or time period.
To celebrate this evolution of Mercury and to highlight the craft we’re bringing to your company spending, we’re introducing a limited-edition IO card designed in collaboration with Simone Bodmer-Turner, a multidisciplinary artist. The card’s look was extrapolated from a tool Simone uses to sculpt and shape her work, just as Mercury Spend and the IO card are tools founders can use to shape their business.
Mercury Spend is now live for all Mercury banking customers and is available as a standalone product for companies that bank elsewhere. To explore what’s new, check out the new Team spend tab in your dashboard for setting up Budgets and issuing them to existing teammates. For guidance on getting set up, check out the guide and videos in our helpcenter, or chat with Mercury Command directly in your account to learn more about Spend.
Ben is Head of Core Product at Mercury, where he works on the interfaces and infrastructure that let people actually run their business through Mercury. He spends most of his time thinking about the future finance stack for ambitious builders, and the rest of his time chasing around his daughter.
