How Common Thread Collective turned remote-first finance into a team strength

“It's been a relief.”

When Common Thread Collective (CTC) went fully remote as a business, expense management nearly broke. With BILL Spend & Expense, Director of Finance Mitch Friesen rebuilt a faster, more flexible financial operation and freed his team to focus on growing their nearly 200 client businesses.

Common Thread Collective is an ecommerce growth agency, helping brands produce better financial outcomes for their business by constructing a system for achieving profitable scale. With headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, CTC has a fully distributed team of nearly 80 full-time employees, in addition to a global and flexible contractor workforce that scales with client seasonality. CTC combines data-driven growth strategy with creative execution across paid social, paid search, SEO, email, and more. Their client roster includes recognized consumer brands, such as Igloo, Nike Strength, APL, and many more.

Mitch Friesen joined CTC nearly seven years ago as an Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable (AP/AR) specialist and has grown alongside the company into his current role as Director of Finance. Today, he leads a three-person finance team supporting the company across their Creative, Platform and Operations teams that are all in service of their active client base make, in his words, “data-driven decisions to really help the direction these businesses want to go.” CTC's clients are the business, so every investment in process and tooling has to directly serve the team's ability to deliver results.

Challenge: Managing spend for a distributed agency 

Before BILL, CTC relied on American Express and Chase corporate cards paired with Expensify for employee reimbursements. When everyone worked from one office in Costa Mesa, California, that setup was manageable. When CTC made the move to fully remote operations in 2020, the cracks became impossible to ignore.

The most immediate pain point was physical cards. If CTC hired a new employee anywhere in the country, a card had to be shipped to the company's business address. Friesen would then forward it to wherever the new hire actually lived which introduced delays and friction to an already fast-moving onboarding process. "We had to get a card shipped to a physical location, our business address, and then I would have to go in and forward that to the employee wherever they lived," Friesen says. "There was no flexibility in budgeting, or allocation of our credit limit or anything like that."

Spend visibility was equally constrained. Charges appeared on a statement with no context, and receipts weren't collected until employees filed their monthly expense reports. "I can see these charges in American Express," Friesen recalls. "What did those mean? I can't see any sort of receipts there." That meant waiting until month-end to reconcile and hoping employees had held onto their documentation.

The result was a finance function that was perpetually reactive. Friesen spent up to 15 hours every month chasing receipts, and budget changes were effectively off the table mid-cycle. For a client-facing agency where responsiveness is part of the product, that wasn't sustainable.

Solution: Real-time spend control built for people on the move

Friesen evaluated multiple platforms before making his decision. "BILL Spend and Expense was by far the best fit for us," he says. "And it's continued to be. We've grown with you guys." Brian Dunbar, Senior VP of Finance says, “We're an agency. Margin discipline is everything. BILL Spend & Expense gives us the controls to actually hold the line on budget without creating friction for the team. People aren't waiting on approvals or working around the system. They're spending within the guardrails, and I can see it happening in real time."

Receipt capture that works at the point of purchase

The shift to BILL changed how CTC thinks about receipts entirely. Every cardholder gets a notification the moment a transaction posts. They can immediately snap a photo of the receipt or forward a digital confirmation to BILL's email inbox, where it's matched automatically with no manual effort required.

"There's no guesswork anymore," Friesen says. "The ability to see everything within one dashboard within one platform has saved me so much time and it's saved our employees a lot of grief hearing from me, 'Hey, where's the receipt?'"

What used to consume over a dozen hours each month now takes roughly two hours*. And because employees handle receipts at the point of purchase, Friesen no longer has to chase anyone down.

Budget flexibility that moves at the speed of business

BILL gave Friesen the ability to adjust budgets in real time. When a team member needs to take a client out to dinner or cover an unexpected expense, Friesen can add funds instantly without waiting for a new billing cycle or having to say no.

That shift changed how the entire organization sees finance. "I'm now the guy they come to and they're like, 'Hey, can we do this?' And I go in and I make sure that they have the budget that they need. If they don't, I just add more," Friesen says. "That level of client care and employee care has been wonderful." 

Tracking employee benefits in real time

One of Friesen's most impactful use cases has nothing to do with vendor payments but for HR. CTC offers every full-time employee an internet reimbursement and a health and wellness reimbursement. Before BILL, tracking utilization required manually exporting transaction data, tallying who submitted what, and reporting back to the HR team. It was slow, and the insights often came too late to act on.

With BILL Spend & Expense, Friesen worked with HR to create a custom field in the platform. Employees tag each reimbursement when they submit, and now utilization is visible in real time. Finance and HR can flex benefits up where demand is high, and reallocate from categories where employees simply aren't engaging.

"We've been able to see where people are utilizing their budget for those different benefits," Friesen says. "And then we've been able to flex up where people need more and reallocate from somewhere else. It's led to more people utilizing benefits, happier people, more flexibility, and people sticking around."

Virtual cards as an unexpected client benefit

CTC's use of virtual cards extends well beyond internal expense management. Friesen maintains 10 to 15 virtual cards for specific purposes including a dedicated ad account backup card for clients whose paid media gets interrupted.

When a client's ads stop spending, often at the worst possible moment, CTC can step in immediately, adding the backup card to the account and working out repayment directly with the client. It's a service CTC never expected to be able to offer.

"Our client doesn't even realize that they have this benefit that BILL offers to them," Friesen says. "But we are able to provide that for them as a benefit outside of something we ever expected to be able to do."

Every charge on that card is automatically traceable and correctly allocated without any manual sorting required.

QuickBooks Online sync that just works

CTC runs on QuickBooks Online for their accounting software, and the integration with BILL Spend & Expense has made month-end reconciliation straightforward. Friesen reviews each charge, confirms account categorization and class coding are correct, then syncs to QuickBooks with a single click.

"Every time I do, it is," he says of the accuracy. "That experience has been so smooth. So seamless."

Results: a finance team that moves faster and thinks bigger

Since adopting BILL Spend & Expense, CTC's finance team has seen meaningful, measurable change and the impact reaches across the organization.

• Expense reconciliation dropped to roughly 2 hours per month, freeing Friesen to focus on higher-leverage work
• Real-time budget flexibility means employees can act in the moment without waiting for finance approval
• Employee benefit utilization is fully visible, enabling HR and finance to allocate reimbursements where employees actually need them
• Virtual cards turned client ad spend disruptions into a non-event, creating a service CTC never expected to deliver
• One-click QuickBooks sync removes manual reconciliation steps from close with consistent accuracy

The time savings have compounded over time. Friesen now dedicates meaningful hours to AI-driven process automation: documenting workflows, improving contract management, and automating routine client outreach. Work that simply wasn't possible before.

"I get to be a part of the deep work with more strategy and stickiness both on the client side and on the employee side."

Asked to describe BILL in one word, Friesen didn't hesitate.

"Relieving. Everything goes through me. I used to be a bottleneck where people would come to me and I wouldn't have all of the information needed in order to provide them with what they needed. But now, BILL Spend & Expense is so user-friendly that people are able to usually answer their questions themselves. And if they can't, I can quickly be the one to provide those answers and allow them to do what they want."

What's next for Common Thread Collective

CTC's data team is expanding, and Friesen has his eye on the BILL API as the next frontier for deeper automation and integration. With a three-person finance team supporting nearly 80 employees and close to 200 client accounts, the focus is on scaling operations without scaling overhead, using the time BILL has given back to build a stronger, more connected organization.

^{¹ The BILL Divvy Card may be issued by one of Divvy Pay, LLC's bank partners (bill.com/bank-partners). The BILL Divvy Card is not a deposit product. For your specific lender, see your Card Agreement. Credit lines and the advertised range are not guaranteed and will be determined upon application approval. *Results as reported by Common Thread Collective based on internal analysis of workflows across clients using the BILL Platform April 2026. Results are based on the experience of a specific customer and are not a guarantee of future performance. Actual results will vary.}