You’ve likely been thinking about the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and how it could impact your employees and business. We’re doing the same here at Divvy. We love our customers — so we wanted to share how we’re thinking about this, as well as measures we’re taking to ensure your financial operations keep running smoothly.
Where we stand now
At the moment, 39 states (and counting) have confirmed cases and COVID-19 has been declared a pandemic. In response, many events and public gatherings are being cancelled, limited, or transitioned to teleconferencing in an effort to reduce the spread. Monitor the current conditions of the virus through the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Department of Health & Human Services and the CDC have created a helpful guide for the current stage of the coronavirus that will provide direction for running your business smoothly and protecting your employees and customers alike.
Most critical: stay home when you have any symptoms of illness, even if they are mild.
What Divvy is doing to keep your financial operations online
Divvy is committed to providing seamless and trustworthy financial services to each and every one of our customers. We know that our 5,000+ customers rely on us staying up and running, so they can too—and we wanted to share what we’re doing to ensure your financial home keeps operating without a hiccup. We hope our practices can also help your business as you decide on your own policies.
Canceled & Minimized Travel
Divvy has canceled all business travel. We have also encouraged our employees to minimize personal travel and implemented disclosure and self-quarantine policies.
Closed Office Visitation
As of March 9, Divvy closed our offices to all non-essential visitors and guests with the goal of limiting person-to-person exposure. We are relying on technology such as Zoom and Slack to conduct meetings, hold demos, and maintain collaboration across our remote teams and partners.
Work from Home
On Sunday, March 8, Divvy announced a mandatory, company-wide, “practice” work-from-home day which was completed Wednesday, March 11 and served as an excellent trial run to help us identify any potential sticking points around remote work.
As news continued (and continues) to unfold, Divvy has extended its mandatory work from home as we continue to evaluate and monitor the situation.
Increased Cleanliness
Divvy has installed more sanitizing stations around our offices, and increased the number of times common areas and surfaces are being cleaned daily.
Increased Readiness
Our HR teams are constantly monitoring information provided by the CDC and World Health Organization to actively assess the threat to our employees and customers. We stand ready to move to longer-term work-from-home operations in order to minimize community spread and continue business as usual.
Continued technological best practices
Divvy’s infrastructure is built on the world’s largest and most advanced IaaS platform — Amazon Web Services (see more on AWS’s pandemic response procedures here). Our systems are administered by seven experienced and fully empowered operators, and are monitored around the clock by best-in-class software monitoring tools to notify our operations team of any anomalous behavior. Our internal incident report and response process is well documented and followed by each team at Divvy.
How to use Divvy to decrease risk
The Divvy platform and mission align well with current precautions recommended by the CDC and can help your business and employees continue to function effectively.
Minimizing physical paperwork
If your employees are unable to come into the office for days or weeks at a time due to quarantine measures, or you’re taking precautionary steps to minimize close proximity contact between employees, make sure you’re taking full advantage of the Divvy expense management capabilities. Using the platform means physical paperwork isn’t being passed around, and employees aren’t needing to stop by multiple desks, cubicles, and offices to get approvals.
Virtual cards don’t change hands
Divvy’s virtual cards make it easy for your employees to buy what they need for their work without having to grab a communal corporate card. In fact, they won’t even need to hand a physical card over to a cashier at all. Think about where you’re using physical card numbers that could be replaced by virtual cards; that practice can help keep your teams up and running during any form of remote work or quarantine, and can further minimize touch contact for safety.
Ease of remote work
Divvy can help alleviate pain of moving to remote work by allowing your departments and employees access to all the finances and records they need remotely. As mentioned above, Divvy users can access budgets in real-time from their phones or computers without needing access to paperwork, invoices, checks, or cards from the office.
Refunds/cancellations managed in real-time
Among Divvy’s strongest features is the real-time money management that helps you spend smarter. Business travel, conferences, and tradeshows around the world are being canceled due to coronavirus concerns. Divvy virtual cards give you the power to monitor and shut down spending in response to any last minute changes.
