Case Study: Life Apartments achieves streamlined volunteer purchases and real-time expense tracking with Emburse (Emburse Cards & Emburse Reach)

Making Purchases Easy for a Network of Volunteers

Life Apartments, a nonprofit serving more than 1.3 million apartment units across 30 states and supported by 1,000+ volunteers, struggled with a prepaid card program that didn’t sync with expense reporting, required manual workarounds, and had slow physical card delivery (>2 weeks). To address these challenges they partnered with Emburse and adopted Emburse Cards and Emburse Reach for a more connected, volunteer-friendly payments and expense workflow.

Emburse implemented virtual and physical cards tied directly to expense profiles and rolled out Emburse Reach for simple reimbursements to non-employees; the scheduled one-hour implementation call took just 15 minutes. The result: instant virtual cards, physical cards delivered in 4–7 days (about half the prior time), faster provisioning and five‑minute card issuance for admins, real-time transaction processing, minimal volunteer training, and much better reporting visibility for finance — all delivered by Emburse.

Life Apartments