Before you offshore accounting, automate

As finance leaders plan for 2025, I see many of my controller friends responding to staffing challenges by outsourcing or offshoring accounting work. 

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After all, if you’re facing a looming audit or lengthy month-end process, why not hire talented professionals around the globe—for example, from India, the Philippines, or Latin America—to categorize reconciliations at a fraction of the cost of their U.S. counterparts? A recent survey reported that 90% of CFOs outsource their accounting functions. Even Google moved several finance functions outside the U.S. earlier this year.

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But there’s an underused strategy that finance leaders should consider more seriously to improve efficiency: automation. Here’s how we use automation at Ramp to enable our lean accounting team of seven to support more than 750 employees. 

Mature accounting automation

Like other accounting departments, our team at Ramp automates expense categorization, basic reconciliations of straightforward accounts such as cash, prepaids, fixed assets, and accounts payables, and multi-entity consolidation. 

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Many teams stop their automation efforts here—but at Ramp, we’ve successfully automated more complex accounting work, like P&L reconciliations.

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Teams usually reconcile P&L by hand because of its complexity. But at its core, the work is predictable, ongoing, and recurring. At Ramp, we’ve embedded accounting logic directly into the product that defines how revenue should be categorized. The resulting data flows directly to our data cloud and business intelligence tools, and allows us to automatically generate reports every month that map transactions to our general ledger. Instead of manually creating reports, my team simply reviews them and uploads the final transactions and summaries to NetSuite. 

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In addition to automation depth, we’ve invested in automation breadth to support non-finance employees. Most employees doing day-to-day finance work don’t actually sit under the Finance function. Yet they’re responsible for requesting budgets, making purchases, submitting invoices and expenses, and approving bills. Tools that streamline the entire intake-to-pay procurement process and eliminate manual expense reporting offer compounding benefits as your organization grows.

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These are just a few areas that many accounting teams have yet to automate, meaning they are missing opportunities to improve productivity and strategic focus. At Ramp, we’re continuing to work with our engineering team to push the boundaries of our automation. We’re building tools that automatically compare Ramp’s data with third-party data sources and flag exceptions for human review. We’re also automating more advanced flux analysis to enable profit analysis by product line. My ultimate goal is to integrate journal entry uploads to NetSuite and enable a continuous close.

When to automate, outsource, or offshore

As finance leaders look to the second half of the year, they need to ask which resourcing strategy will give them the best return—quantitatively and qualitatively. Here’s a simple decision framework: 

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Edwine Alphonse

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Senior Controller, Ramp

Born and raised in Haiti, Edwine has lived in Canada, France, Grand Cayman, and currently resides in Boston with her family. She is a CPA and has had many leadership roles at EY, PwC, and Circle. She joined Ramp in March 2021 as our first controller.