Penny Inc: Helping businesses automate, control and monitor their expenses

I know, firsthand, the number of pressures and day-to-day challenges associated with running a business. Spending hours managing expenses shouldn’t be one of them.

From expense claims, receipts and employee reimbursements to unexpected budget blowouts, keeping business expenses in check can be demanding, often resulting in overtime and weekends spent catching up on paperwork.

These are some of the problems I experienced running my own independent travel management company.

So, with fellow co-founder Tony Ferguson, a card payments expert in the financial sector, we created Penny Inc to address the lack of easy-to-use and suitably priced expense management services for small- to medium-sized businesses.

Penny Inc filled this gap in the market with a simple, automated and cloud-based application that’s paired with a prepaid debit MasterCard – free to sign up and free from monthly fees.

Today, Penny Inc has a fast growing customer base of small businesses, delivery businesses, non-profit organizations and charities.

Functionality and main features

Penny Inc is a smart expense management app integrated with a prepaid debit MasterCard that helps businesses automate, control and monitor their expenses. It’s a complete solution that ultimately saves time and money, making petty cash, manual reimbursement claims, occurrences of fraud, and the commingling of personal and business expenditures things of the past.

Business owners and managers can instantly transfer funds to Penny cards anytime, anywhere, as well as set spend and merchant controls. For example, a card can be converted into a “fuel only” card, with a weekly limit set at $200.

Key features: 

1. No fees: There are no transaction fees, no monthly fees and no upfront fees. The only cost is a third-party transaction fee on foreign exchange.
2. Real-time integration: Penny cards automatically integrate with QuickBooks® and most major cloud accounting software in real-time, shedding hours off monthly administrative tasks.
3. Increased automation: With real-time integration, Penny cards eliminate the need for manual data entry into spreadsheets for expense claims and re-entering or transferring data into accounting software. Everything is accounted for automatically at the time of the transaction.

What sets Penny Inc apart

Two of the most common expensing complaints are the cost of cards and the time delay for ACH fund transfers. Penny Inc has been proactive in addressing these issues, which has in turn set us apart from our competitors.

Any extra cost can put pressure on a business’ budget and we wanted to assist small businesses with their cash flow, not add another expense to their list.

That’s why Penny Inc is completely free – it’s free to sign up, our cloud-based application is free to use and we issue debit MasterCards for free, with no monthly or yearly fees.

Penny has also been successful in implementing following day settlement for ACH fund transfers from the Penny user’s financial institution. This is a significant improvement on the three- to five-day wait period offered by our competitors.

There’s also no credit risk. The cards are prepaid debit cards, which the business owner can issue, distribute to their employees and control.

Customer feedback

“Convenience” and “making life easier” tend to be the most popular benefits Penny card users highlight.

“The effect it has had on our business is amazing. We were giving out our own credit cards to staff. Penny saved our lives and our business, and made everything a lot easier” – Just Deliveries, a restaurant delivery business based in Maryland.

Working with QuickBooks

Penny Inc is a real-time plug-in integration with QuickBooks. As money is spent on a Penny card, transactions are automatically downloaded into that company’s accounts ledger on QuickBooks.

Audience

Penny Inc is suitable for any organization that wants to eliminate manual reimbursement processes, reduce the potential for expense blowouts, increase financial transparency, and save time and money.

Currently, we’re targeting small to medium business that are seeking a cost-effective solution to managing expenses, and we’ve been successful particularly in engaging delivery organizations.

Penny Inc is also committed to social impact, looking at how we can assist charitable, non-for-profit and disaster relief organizations in their efforts to help and deliver value to the community.

For example, our partnership with Hearing the Homeless (HTH) has provided them with a digitized solution that gets donations to the homeless in an easy and transparent manner, at no cost to HTH.

Way forward

We’re committed to ongoing innovation and, in 2019, we’ll continue to work on developing and delivering additional functionality, automation and time savings to business owners, enabling them to focus on the more important things in life.

In particular, we’ll be enhancing the transaction data that is transferred to third-party accounting systems, looking at issues that include duplication prevention.

Our Penny Inc API also allows us to partner with developers, so that our fintech can be integrated into their own solutions. This could open up a whole new suite of user cases.

Also on the 2019 horizon is an exciting expansion. We’re currently working on making Penny Inc available beyond the US, for use in Canada and Australia.

To learn more about Penny, click here.