Betterment invests in a comprehensive procurement solution

The challenge

Betterment is a trusted wealth and savings platform, serving Gen Z and millennial investors with a mission to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease. Supporting a fast-paced company behind the scenes around all needs from a procurement standpoint was a challenge.

With a headcount of over 500 employees and a growing vendor base, there was no structured process connecting how spend was requested to how it was ultimately paid. Intake was unstructured and bottlenecked. Vendor onboarding moved too slowly, with no visibility into where things stood, and by the time invoices arrived, the coding, approvals, and payment details that should have been established upfront often weren't. This left the accounts payable team to piece things together on the back end.

Spend analysis was equally reactive. "After we had already spent the money, we would then analyze what was happening,” said Peter Lorimer, CFO at Betterment.

The gaps in their intake-to-pay process were becoming impossible to ignore. The team needed a process that held together end to end, not just at the front door.

The solution

Betterment implemented Zip as the connective tissue across its entire intake-to-pay process — from the moment a request is submitted through vendor onboarding, PO creation, invoice coding, and final payment.

Request intake: Every purchase requiring a signature starts in Zip before any commitment is made. Conditional workflow logic routes each request to the right approvers based on spend type, department, dollar threshold, and contract terms. Automated reminders keep approvals moving, and every requester has real-time visibility into where their request stands.

Vendor onboarding: At intake, requesters are able to search pre-existing NetSuite vendors to ensure that a duplicate vendor is not created. If a vendor is new, they are onboarded through Zip's vendor portal, which collects W-9s, banking details, and compliance documentation in a single step. Only vendors fully onboarded through Zip get created in NetSuite, eliminating the risk of one-off vendor records being pushed to the ERP outside of the approved process.

Purchase orders: Approved requests automatically generate purchase orders in Zip, with all coding established at the time of approval, giving the accounting team a locked, pre-approved record before any invoice arrives.

Invoice processing and payment: When invoices come in, Betterment's AP team codes them using the corresponding PO in Zip, with bills flowing to NetSuite in real time. For vendors that accept cards, Betterment issues Brex-backed virtual cards directly through the Zip UI with the same intake approvals and coding applied upfront, so card transactions arrive at NetSuite already coded and reconciled. Month-end close is supported by accrual exports that surface open commitments, including invoices received but not yet processed.

Controls and audit readiness: Vendor change history, permission group exports, workflow audit logs, and bank information change records give Betterment's team the evidence they need for recurring audit support without custom engineering requests or manual reconstruction.

The results

Today, Betterment has processed more than 1,600 requests in the past year alone, all without a dedicated procurement function.

Vendor onboarding now happens in a median of two days, intake cycle times are in line with benchmarks, and legal approvals are moving more quickly. Perhaps most importantly, the AP team is no longer chasing down coding details after the fact because the information they need to process and pay an invoice is established before the contract is ever signed.

"Zip is our procurement function," said Lorimer. "It allows our team members — whether that's in legal, compliance, risk, or finance — to jump into a procurement process without having dedicated headcount to manage that."

The shift from reactive to proactive has been the defining change. Finance now has visibility into committed spend before money moves. Requesters know exactly where things stand, and the audit trail is built into the process rather than reconstructed after the fact.

"Zip is bringing all of that decision-making up and allowing us to accelerate our throughput in ways that would never have been possible without a great partner like Zip," Lorimer said. "Despite the growing number of stakeholders and countless more intakes and vendors to manage, Zip has helped us be efficient and nimble."

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