Coast raises $35 million as businesses look for better ways to manage company spending
A company credit card can make life easier for employees who need to buy supplies, pay for fuel or settle a bill while working away from the office. For the person handling the accounts, however, every purchase leaves another transaction to check.
Coast
A company credit card can make life easier for employees who need to buy supplies, pay for fuel or settle a bill while working away from the office.
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A company credit card can make life easier for employees who need to buy supplies, pay for fuel or settle a bill while working away from the office. For the person handling the accounts, however, every purchase leaves another transaction to check. That is the problem Coast wants to tackle. The New York-based fintech startup has raised $35 million to help businesses manage employee purchases, pay suppliers and track expenses through one platform, according to Fortune.
The company is targeting contractors and other businesses where employees regularly spend money on the company's behalf. Its pitch centres on a familiar headache for business owners: keeping track of spending without spending hours chasing receipts and checking transactions.
Company cards are easy to issue. Tracking the money is harder.
“The money has already been spent. The problem is that the owner may not have a complete picture of the cost until later.”
When a business has a few employees making purchases, keeping records may not be too difficult. The owner can check the bank statement, collect receipts and update a spreadsheet.
That changes when the company takes on more work. A contractor could have workers buying materials for different sites, paying for fuel and collecting equipment from suppliers. The transactions keep coming, but the paperwork does not always arrive at the same time.
Someone then has to establish what each payment was for, which project it belongs to and whether the purchase was authorised. Miss a receipt or record a cost against the wrong job, and the company's accounts may not tell the full story. The owner could end up making pricing or budgeting decisions using incomplete figures. Coast is building its business around this gap between making a payment and accounting for it.
Contractors have plenty of expenses to keep track of
For contractors, spending does not always happen from one office or through one purchasing department. Employees may need to buy materials or pay for services while work is underway. Take a business handling several jobs at once. One employee buys equipment for one project while another pays a supplier for a different job. Both purchases may be legitimate, but the business still needs to keep the costs separate.
If that information only gets sorted out at the end of the month, the owner may struggle to see what individual jobs are actually costing. The same problem affects transport companies and other businesses with employees who regularly make purchases in the field. Coast's focus on contractors puts it in a market where managing spending is part of running the operation, not just an accounting task.
What Coast wants to bring together
According to Fortune, Coast's platform is designed to help businesses manage company card purchases, make vendor payments and track expenses. These activities often involve the same money moving through different stages. An employee makes a purchase, the supplier gets paid and the expense must eventually be recorded in the company's books.
When the information sits in separate systems, finance staff may have to check several records to understand a single transaction. Coast wants to make that process less fragmented. For businesses, the appeal would be having a clearer record of purchases and spending without having to piece together information from different sources.
Whether that saves significant time will depend on how the platform works in practice and how easily it fits into a company's existing financial processes.
The $35 million funding round
The $35 million raise gives Coast additional funding as it develops its offering for businesses. The announcement comes as companies look for ways to manage financial administration without allowing it to grow at the same pace as their operations. More employees and projects usually mean more transactions to review, more suppliers to pay and more records to maintain. For smaller companies, these responsibilities often sit with the owner or a lean finance team. They still need to know where the money is going, even if they cannot afford a large department to manage it.
Software can take some of the manual work out of that process, but businesses will want to know whether the cost is justified and whether the system makes their existing routines easier. Fortune's available summary does not identify the investors involved in Coast's funding round or explain how the company plans to use the money.
Better records matter when margins are tight
Expense tracking might sound like a back-office issue, but it can affect decisions about the business itself. A contractor who underestimates the cost of materials may quote too little for the next job. A transport operator who does not keep proper track of fuel and maintenance costs may misjudge how profitable a route is.
In both cases, the money has already been spent. The problem is that the owner may not have a complete picture of the cost until later. Coast is betting that businesses will pay for tools that make this information easier to manage. Its challenge is to show that the platform does more than organise transactions it must help customers handle their finances with less administrative effort.
