Raise your hand if you love expense reporting! (This article is not for you.) At thoughtbot, we’re not fans of processing expenses since it takes time away from more fulfilling work. Last year we applied our value of Continuous Improvement to see if we could save time…
Saving time to do more of what we love
Finance tools are always evolving and while our expenses process was working okay we thought there was a good chance it could be better. We asked around and did some research. Lots of expense management tools aim to give finance more control over what people are spending money on. That wasn’t what we needed. We wanted to make our process more streamlined and save everyone time.
🌍 As a remote company with our team spread across many countries, we ideally wanted a solution that would support all our team regardless of which country they are in.
We had a bit of difficulty finding a solution that worked equally well in all the countries our employees are in so we decided to make improvements in the US and then iterate from there. While there are many options, we found Ramp and Emburse were the best fit for us and after further investigations we decided to go with Ramp.
💳 Why we chose Ramp
- It allows unlimited virtual cards. This meant we could move the categorisation of spend earlier in the process. By having virtual Ramp cards with a pre-set vendor or category, we are able to pre-set the accounting category. This means a transaction will automatically go to the right place in our accounting system. It saves our team members from making category choices, and it saves our finance team from checking or chasing people for information.
- Another feature we love is Ramp’s ability to find receipts in people’s inboxes. If you give it access, it will find receipts and attach them to your transactions in Ramp. This is probably the best bit as it not only saves time but it saves people from doing boring admin.
- Ramp’s free version has a cashback incentive of 1.5% of spend so we are saving money compared to our previous expense management system.
How we went about the change
We like to do things iteratively, so the first round of Ramp cards we issued were for each team member’s workspace equipment allowance. We were able to set up these cards with the correct spending category as mentioned above. We did this in bulk, which again helps save time. Each team member having a card for their workspace equipment allowance is also helping our team members track how much they have spent, and hence how much they have left.
Once people were used to using their Ramp cards, we then went ahead with issuing more virtual Ramp cards according to people’s spending needs. We were a little worried that people might not be ok having multiple virtual Ramp cards and needing to use the right card for a particular type of spend. However, I’m glad to say our team adapted quickly. Finance were also fine to adjust the categorisation in the accounting system if someone mistakenly used the wrong card.
📊 We’ve also set up a virtual Ramp card for each of our subscriptions. With Ramp allowing unlimited virtual cards, we’ve been able to have a card for each monthly subscription which again removes the need for a person to categorise a transaction. Ramp sometimes makes suggestions about how to combine subscriptions to save money though for various reasons we’ve not followed these so much. Even so, the transparency into our recurring spend is helping us ensure we don’t have subscriptions we no longer need.
Overall, Ramp has saved us hours of admin time — time that was previously spent processing expenses. That means more time to build great software, which is what we find most fulfilling.
Practical takeaways
- ✅ Start small and iterate: Don’t try to move everything at once. Begin with a simple use case (like equipment allowances) to help your team build confidence before expanding.
- ✅ Use unlimited virtual cards strategically: Create cards for vendors, categories, or subscriptions to automate categorisation and reduce finance team overhead.
- ✅ Lean on automation: Take advantage of features like automatic receipt matching from email inboxes — these small automations save hours of admin time.
- ✅ Balance control with trust: Pick tools that support your values. For us, Ramp’s flexibility let us empower people to spend responsibly without adding extra approval steps.
- ✅ Expect a mindset shift: Having many cards is different from traditional systems where “fewer cards = simpler.”
- ✅ Review and prune regularly: Use the visibility Ramp gives into subscriptions and recurring costs to ensure you’re only paying for what you really need.