If you’ve ever had to submit an expense for work, whether it was for business travel or accounts payable, you might have come across Emburse.

Today, Emburse contains a whole suite of expense management and payments solutions like Abacus, Chrome River, Certify, and Nexonia—and is trusted by more than 12 million people and 20,000 organizations around the world, from global corporations to public sector agencies to small businesses. 

But Emburse’s journey to get here took many years, with a variety of both technical and strategic organizational hurdles for its team.

The challenge

A few years ago, Emburse (then branded as Abacus) was primarily an expense tracking platform with both web and mobile touchpoints. With limited resources and staffing at the time, its native mobile apps were in need of updates and enhancements—new feature developments had been deprioritized, with only essential maintenance being done to keep the app running well.

Emburse’s team also wanted to build a new virtual credit card product at a time when the business was in the midst of becoming what would be known as Emburse today, in addition to weathering a pandemic and undergoing several reorgs. 

With so much going on, the team wanted to focus on its priority initiatives such as updating key legacy applications to conform to a consistent set of standards for the growing business and building new centralized services. To maintain velocity on both work streams, they decided to outsource the improvements to its iOS and Android apps.

But to accomplish this, they needed a technology partner that didn’t need much direction or internal resources to jump in on a strategic level and execute projects both big and small.

Emburse chose HFC to help:

• Provide ongoing technical leadership while the internal team was undergoing major organizational changes and shifts in priorities
• Ship key features for the mobile apps while Emburse was considering its longer-term mobile strategy
• Optimize the mobile app for production stability so that it could be white labeled and custom-branded for Emburse’s customers
• Build out support for a new virtual credit card product

HFC’s approach

HFC first performed a technical audit of Emburse’s mobile codebases to de-risk the overall engagement, before starting the project.

This step was especially crucial because one of the projects in this engagement was the build-out of a new virtual card product, and it had a strict deadline. The audit of Emburse’s existing codebases, tooling, and practices helped HFC gain confidence that the team could hit the tight deadline, even with design and backend engineering dependencies.

Training

While Emburse was in the process of hiring and training up a number of new team members to support the company’s growth, HFC provided stability for the web team by embedding its own senior team members into Emburse’s organization to work directly with PMs and engineering leadership.

These embedded specialists integrated themselves quickly, and hit the ground running to pick up the slack and continue the essential work that was needed during this time.

Ongoing development to update apps and support Emburse’s sales process

As part of the ongoing work to update Emburse’s native apps, HFC updated and refactored a lot of the code, which needed to be updated—for example, moving from Objective-C to Swift, which allowed for faster development.

Separately, because Emburse’s business was mainly sales-driven, there were often “reactive” requests to make specific changes or improvements to the product to secure new customers and deals. 

With the team’s unique skill sets and deep understanding of the client’s operational requirements, HFC stepped in to support Emburse’s lean in-house team, provide reliable engineering thought partnership, and keep this work going during the many reorgs.

Strategic planning

HFC also provided fresh eyes and strategic input on the development process, outlining issues and proposing solutions that could be implemented over time.

On top of that, we also helped Emburse’s team manage existing technical debt, providing recommendations on how to pay down tech debt while still hitting product release deadlines. 

New feature development

Besides designing and building Emburse’s new virtual credit cards, HFC also worked closely with the in-house team to develop other new features for Emburse’s mobile apps.

A major challenge in the beginning was achieving production stability in Emburse’s mobile apps, which eventually led to UI/UX updates and the addition of new features that made it possible to whitelabel those apps so they could be repurposed for Emburse’s other customers.

The results

Along with successfully supporting the disparate projects initially tasked with, the team played a crucial role in stabilizing the business during Emburse’s significant operational changes.

Emburse's journey from a simple expense tracking platform to a comprehensive suite of expense management solutions highlights not only its team’s resilience, but also the power of choosing strategic and adaptable partners. 

By collaborating with HFC, Emburse was able to overcome significant technical and resourcing challenges, and build a foundation for the continued growth of its products and business. 

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