How Cherry Built Scalable Procurement with Tropic and Brex

About Cherry

Cherry is a rapidly growing San Francisco-based fintech company building the simplest, fastest, and most inclusive Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) solution for medical practices. With leading financing terms for practices and patients, Cherry is the preferred partner to many practices across aesthetics, dental, plastic surgery, veterinary, and more.

Cherry’s finance team includes Jonathan Khalfayan, Senior Finance Manager, and Grant Hylton, Senior Accounting Manager. Together they’re responsible for building and managing the financial and accounting operations across the organization. 

The Challenge

Scaling bottlenecks tests Cherry's lean team philosophy

Cherry built their success on running lean operations across all functions. Their approach to procurement and payments was no different: store contracts in Google Drive and process invoices through Brex for payment. 

However, this created scaling challenges as the company grew and transaction volumes increased. Manual contract and invoice processes started to reach their limit. 

Without systematic contract oversight, Cherry faced every finance leader's nightmare: invisible spend commitments and surprise renewals that could derail their budget or forecasts.

“Our strategic goals really just have to do with efficiency and scalability,” Grant noted. “How do we keep a lean team, do things efficiently?

During strategic planning, the team made it a goal to improve the company’s vendor controls and streamline its processes. 

“The first step is aggregating all of our contracts in one single place and making sure that that is the source of truth,” Jonathan explained. “We made that an OKR to improve our vendor controls and the way we forecast, to really make sure that we're getting the value out of Tropic.”

The Solution

Route every purchase and renewal with zero roadblocks

Rather than hire procurement employees or expand accounting headcount, Cherry discovered how to turn their existing systems into an intelligent intake-to-pay using Tropic's integration with Brex.

Instead of scattered purchase requests, Tropic seamlessly routes purchase and renewal requests to the right stakeholders with full audit trails and automated approvals.

“It gives us a full line of sight into all of our vendors,” Jonathan noted. “There are no rogue vendors, no random contracts that we're not aware of or that might be renewing automatically.”

Integrate Tropic + Brex for unexpected operational multiplier

Tropic provided the foundation with spend visibility and contract management. But the breakthrough was connecting Tropic to Cherry's payment processes in Brex. With Tropic AI Invoice Match, every invoice processed through Brex automatically gets verified against contracts in Tropic, flagging discrepancies and missing agreements before payment.

"With Tropic and Brex, every invoice is checked against our contracts automatically,” Grant added. “It catches issues before we pay and gives us peace of mind knowing nothing slips through the cracks, all without changing the way we work in Brex.”

The integration gives Cherry both contract management and invoice verification without disrupting their existing Brex workflows, turning Tropic and Brex into a pack of spend watchdogs.

“Everything that I'm doing for GL coding and getting all the proper approvals for an invoice still lives in Brex and is virtually unchanged… It's perfectly integrated into our AP process with Brex,” Grant noted. “That’s definitely something that's been a game changer on the accounting side.”

The Outcome

A built-in guardrail against invoice errors

Integrating Tropic and Brex has created what Grant calls "a net-new control" that would be impossible to implement manually. The automatic invoice matching adds another layer of control that they wouldn’t tackle manually.

"It would be too time-intensive to pay someone to look at every single invoice and compare it to the contract,” Grant explained.

“This is the case where now we can maybe catch some of those things upfront and possibly even before we pay the invoice – which can really help when you may have a disagreement or some dispute with a vendor.”

Increase 4x contract visibility while maintaining lean team structure

Using the two systems together gives a powerful one-two punch to help Cherry achieve streamlined financial controls without traditional scaling costs.

"Tropic replaces a lot of the functions of a centralized procurement team. It pairs very well with lean finance and ops teams that don't have time to manage contracts as their full-time job,” Jonathan said. 

“It speeds things up, it accelerates processes, it creates efficiencies. I think it’s a necessary solution. Otherwise, you're going to be on Google drive and you won't have the necessary controls in place to have full visibility into your third party contracts and agreements.” 

He also praised how quickly they were able to get contract data into Tropic. “In less than one week, you can have all your contracts on the system, with the right owners, the right dates, and all the information you need,” he explained. 

Future-proof their foundation without operational complexity

Jonathan mentioned the flexibility of the platform to meet their current needs but also leave room to grow, whether they choose to negotiate with vendors themselves, or bring in Tropic’s expert services team to handle large-scale negotiations. 

“It's not a one-size-fits-all model,” he explained. “So I do think it's a really flexible, scalable, efficiency driven solution that gives you the necessary controls for anything contract management.”

As Cherry continues growing in the competitive BNPL space, this integrated financial and accounting foundation can adapt with them.

"I'm sure that in two years, we're going to be using Tropic in a completely different way than we are right now," Grant noted. “If we do have updates to our procurement process… Those are things that Tropic will allow for and actually enable us to do in a very efficient way.”

The flexibility to evolve processes without rebuilding systems will give Cherry a crucial competitive advantage: They can focus resources on core business growth rather than deal with internal operational scaling challenges.