Product Spotlight: Waste Less, Grow More with Ramp

PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT 🌟

Meet Ramp

Forget points-based rewards programs. Say goodbye to the hours you spent reconciling your books at the end of the month. Because like SwagUp, Ramp believes less is more.

Specifically, less waste, less hassle, and less confusion — so you can focus on growing more business.

Ramp, unlike any other corporate card out there, is built around helping you keep more money in the bank by making it easy to see real-time spend and eliminating redundant expenses with its proprietary algorithm.

And minimalists that are fans of all-in-one solutions like Notion will rejoice at this: Ramp isn’t just a corporate credit card. It’s also an expense and spend management platform.

“[Ramp solves for the] fragmentation of systems across your financial stack. A company today is probably using a variety of tools to manage spend: they might be using a corporate card to manage spend internally, an expense management tool like Expensify, Concur or Abacus to code expenses and track receipts and personal reimbursements, and then a third system to keep track of all of their vendors and subscriptions,” says Alex Nicola-Iott, Growth at Ramp. “Ramp is all of these -- a corporate card, expense management platform, and vendor management tool -- wrapped in one.”

This is also what helps Ramp stand out against alternative options like Brex and American Express:

“We completely eliminate the need to have a separate expense management platform. Ramp is able to issue corporate cards, both physical and virtual, while also automatically capturing the receipts and memos and automating the month-end reconciliation process with your accounting platform of choice. Employees no longer need to submit an expense report using a separate piece of software. We’re seeing that companies who switch over are saving around one hour per month per employee by consolidating this into one platform.”

“[Ramp solves for the] fragmentation of systems across your financial stack. A company today is probably using a variety of tools to manage spend: they might be using a corporate card to manage spend internally, an expense management tool like Expensify, Concur or Abacus to code expenses and track receipts and personal reimbursements, and then a third system to keep track of all of their vendors and subscriptions. Ramp is all of these -- a corporate card, expense management platform, and vendor management tool -- wrapped in one.”

— ALEX NICOLA-IOTT, GROWTH AT RAMP

The Ramp team isn’t new to the savings game; co-founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh previously built, scaled, and sold Paribus — a consumer savings app that tracks price drops and refunds money to its users — to Capital One.

Then while running Paribus as part of Capital One, they saw firsthand how much of a need there was for a modern corporate card. Now they’re aiming to provide the same value to businesses with a financial stack that supports growing businesses. In short, Ramp is made to be a fintech solution for teams in the modern era.

The new rules of spend

When it comes to finances, clarity is key. Here’s how Ramp looks at the role of finances in a growing business:

1. Understand where money flows to reduce burn — Ramp provides the tools you need to get the insights you want. The end result? Saved time and effort. Through the use of both virtual and physical cards, you can track and analyze spending by cardholder, vendor, category, and department and quickly identify trends in real-time.
2. Saving a dollar is 100x better than getting back points — which, by the way, suspiciously seem to have arbitrary values designated by credit card companies.
3. It’s a team effort — every cardholder plays a role in the company’s financial health. So why not empower people to make the right decisions?

“What we found is that as a company starts to grow, the most important question these companies are asking is how can we reduce our burn? How can we maximize our revenue? In doing those exploratory conversations, we heard time and time again that the most important thing to them was cashback,” says Alex.

“That’s why [Ramp] offers 1.5% cashback, an industry-leading amount, on every purchase, uncapped, across all categories, including ad spend, cloud computing spend, software, and travel. These are big categories that companies tend to spend more on as they grow from a startup to a larger company.”

It’s as simple as it sounds. 1.5% cash back on everything, no exceptions. Ramp helps you avoid leaving money on the table while simultaneously eliminating redundant expenses through their proprietary algorithms. In addition, Ramp gives it users access to partner rewards worth over $200,000 with companies like Amazon, Google, Plaid, and more.

“We have built proprietary technology using AI and machine learning to automatically surface savings insights to our customers. Once a company is onboarded to the platform, Ramp works in the background to analyze card transactions to identify duplicate and redundant spend, flag large spend increases, and even alert teams about savings they can find by moving to lower pricing plans for software tools they’re using, “ says Alex.

“Ramp found over $250,000 in savings right out of the gate. That, plus Ramp's 1.5% cash back on top, is far more valuable than any points program, and has been a gamechanger for our 400 person company.”

— NICK GREENFIELD, FOUNDER AND CEO AT CANDID CO.

In other words, if there are three different people at the company all paying for a Dropbox or G Suite subscription, Ramp catches it and notifies the appropriate leaders for an opportunity to consolidate licenses.

“For midsize companies - think Series B, Series C - [that’s] around $100,000 worth of savings in the first year just from all of these things that have kind of been swept under the rug or that haven't been brought to their attention,” says Alex. And once users are onboarded to the Ramp platform, Ramp will automatically look for duplicative spend. This in itself is immediately a huge benefit.

A smart and flexible tech stack for modern teams

Interested in trying Ramp? It’s easier than you think to get started. “We can get people switched over in typically about 60 minutes,” says Alex. After that, the Ramp team handles everything else.

“We have an account management team that helps to onboard them once they've completed the application and been approved. They'll do everything from bulk-inviting users, to helping set-up the hierarchy of the account and providing advice on things like who should be an admin versus a manager, what the limits should be, and who needs a physical versus a virtual card, etc. It's a pretty painless process.”

Ramp also allows for a ton of flexibility with the cards that are issued: cards can have limits that recur on a monthly basis, but also can be set-up to have limits that recur on a daily basis, for things like per diems, or a yearly basis, for things like educational stipends. You can even issue cards with non-recurring limits, which have been popular during COVID for companies looking to give employees a one-time stipend to buy equipment for their desks to work from home.

Ramp also allows finance teams to set rules for how they want transactions to be coded in their accounting platform to reduce the amount of time they spend reconciling expenses at the end of each month. “Ramp can code 90-95% of transactions automatically based on the rules the finance team sets. Once you do an initial one-time setup of your accounting platform and map departments and locations as well as rules at the category and merchant level, Ramp can code future transactions automatically. We’ve seen this reduce the time teams spend reconciling books at the end of the month from a week [for larger companies] down to less than an hour with the technology we’ve built.”

Modern finance teams save:

5.4 days / month $15k / month

Aside from making it easy to get granular on spend per day through an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard, Ramp also integrates with the tech you are probably already using, like Slack, Quickbooks, Xero, Netsuite, and Sage Intacct. And best of all, it’s 100% free to use.

The bottom line: Ramp helps you cut waste and run a leaner business.

Learn more at ramp.com 🎉 🚀

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