Clear Visibility Leads to Stronger Spend Decisions: How quip Uses Tropic to Understand Spending Trends

About quip

quip is a design-led oral health and wellness company that launched in 2015 and is on a mission to change oral care habits from a have-to chore to a want-to ritual. quip creates bold, simple, design driven products that are backed by science and intuitive to use, which empower everyone to proactively make their mouth part of their daily wellness routine. 

TJ Novella, Director of Strategic Finance at quip, shares more about how Tropic’s unified spend management platform helps quip become more efficient with their time and money.

The Challenge

Minimal visibility into contracts led to inefficient auto-renewals and negotiations

quip, like many growing companies, stored their software contracts as PDFs in a static internal folder, making it difficult to find information such as term length or renewal date. The lack of visibility led to inefficiencies when it came to renewal. 

“We would just auto-renew contracts because we didn't know they were there,” Novella explained. “It would be the same price, but we didn’t need as many licenses. So even though the license count decreased, it just kept renewing."

It was also time-consuming for quip to manually review contract terms, identify renewal dates, and coordinate the levels of approvals among team members. The less time they were given to manage renewals, the less likely they were to negotiate an optimal deal.

The Solution

Access spend data within seconds from a centralized system

Now, quip has one centralized source for their spend management. The team uploads a contract into Tropic and key contract details are automatically extracted and searchable, from time of renewal to opt-out dates. 

With fuller visibility into their spend, they are able to plan ahead by knowing which months may be heavier in spend than others.  

“Tropic tells you when things are coming up, how much you're spending — when, where, and why. It gives one less thing you don't have to worry about,” Novella said. “It sorts out spend by month. I think that's really helpful from a finance perspective — to be able to look at the spend of suppliers by month and analyze it that way.”

Get pricing intelligence to compare proposals and set expectations

quip values the ability to gather price benchmarking data with a click of a button. Team members can get a data-backed starting point for their negotiations. 

Novella explained that some team members still enjoy handling contract negotiations for smaller purchases, but they were often in the dark on whether they were getting the right price for their specific SKU or company size. 

“Price Benchmarks was a fantastic enhancement. It’s like having somebody on your shoulder whisper in your ear to confirm, ‘I am not getting overcharged and not leaving anything out,’” Novella said. “It helps everybody when they're in their own workflow.”

Receive expertise from trusted a negotiation team

For higher impact purchases that require complex negotiations, supplier insights in Tropic are supplemented with guidance from Tropic’s specialized experts. 

Tropic’s procurement services team are experts in the tools they negotiate, so they can surface opportunities for efficiencies and savings — like an eye-opening 29% savings on their Stripe renewal.  

“It was really helpful to have somebody that knew all these areas where you could get savings or efficiencies, or maybe we needed another plugin or enhancements that we didn't know about,” Novella added. “When you're in those certain situations, sometimes there are things most people don't know about unless they're an expert.”

The Outcome

Better understanding of company spend and overlapping suppliers

As a longtime customer of Tropic, the quip team continues to improve efficiencies in their purchasing process by reviewing the analytics and data in Tropic and integrating their ERP and accounting systems to provide even more context for insights. 

Because they have all of their suppliers stored in Tropic, they can easily review spend over time, compare against what other companies are paying, and start to make more strategic budget decisions. 

 The added efficiency from consolidating suppliers and reviewing spend trends will open up opportunities for potential time and cost savings, allowing quip to focus on their yearly strategic initiatives.

“I've had Tropic for a couple years. Beyond savings, where Tropic is helpful is especially in our tech stack conversations,” Novella said. “It’s starting to help us foresee whether we are paying for things that we don't use, efficiency levels, and more. We’re starting to really drive it home and not focus just on saving as much money as we can.”