Major platform changes often raise questions, particularly for finance teams responsible for stability, scalability, and long-term control. With the recent news that Capital One is acquiring Brex, some companies may begin to consider whether their finance stack still aligns with how they operate today.
Acquisitions don’t immediately change day-to-day workflows, but they often prompt finance teams to step back and reassess their tools. Questions about product direction, prioritization, and long-term fit naturally arise during periods of change—especially for teams who thought they were getting a nimble fintech and wound up with a legacy bank.
For teams already experiencing friction, these moments can bring existing challenges into sharper focus. Growing manual work, limited flexibility as spend increases, or tools that worked well early on may feel less suited to more complex workflows.
That pause often turns into a broader evaluation of fit, prompting questions like:
- Does our current platform still support where we’re headed?
- Are manual processes increasing as complexity grows?
- Do we have the visibility and controls we need as spend scales?
The case studies below highlight businesses that encountered these questions and chose to move from Brex to Ramp. While each team’s situation was different, the underlying theme was the same: As finance operations scale, the tools supporting them need to keep up.
Brex to Ramp customer stories
These companies reassessed their finance stack and switched to Ramp to reduce manual work, improve visibility, and gain tighter control over spend.
Piñata
Company | Size & Industry | Description | Pain Point |
|---|---|---|---|
Piñata | SMB | A rewards and credit-building platform helping renters earn rewards and build credit through rent payments. | Time wasted on manual processes. |
Challenge
As Piñata scaled its distributed team, expense management became increasingly manual and difficult to control. While Brex offered some automation, Piñata’s finance team still spent hours each week matching receipts to expenses and following up with employees for missing documentation.
Submitting receipts wasn’t intuitive for employees, resulting in nearly 40% of transactions missing receipts. Finance had no way to automatically pull receipts from inboxes or enforce timely submission, which delayed month-end close and created extra cleanup work. Limited mobile functionality also made it harder for the team to adjust card limits or issue new cards quickly, especially for teams frequently on the road.
Brex’s rewards system added further complexity without delivering clear value, requiring time spent evaluating points instead of improving spend visibility and controls.
Key challenges included:
- Manual receipt matching that consumed hours each week
- High percentage of missing receipts, slowing month-end close
- Limited ability to enforce timely receipt submission
- Difficulty adjusting card limits or issuing cards via mobile
- Rewards complexity without meaningful cost savings
Solution
Piñata replaced Brex with Ramp’s corporate card and expense management platform to reduce manual work and improve spend control as the company grew.
Ramp automated receipt collection by pulling receipts directly from employee inboxes and integrating with common vendors like Uber and Amazon Business. Finance gained the ability to issue cards, adjust limits, and approve expenses from the mobile app, allowing the team to support employees quickly without relying on desktop access or support requests.
To improve compliance, Piñata implemented automated card locking for missing receipts, which encouraged employees to submit documentation on time. The team also began using spend insights to identify unusual activity and duplicate software subscriptions.
- Automated receipt collection reduced manual follow-up
- Mobile controls enabled faster card management and approvals
- Card auto-locks improved receipt compliance
- Spend insights surfaced duplicate tools and cost anomalies
Results
With Ramp, Piñata significantly reduced manual finance work while improving expense compliance and visibility.
Receipt compliance increased to 95%, a nearly 60% improvement over Brex. The finance team cut weekly expense cleanup time in half, saving roughly 20 hours per month, and reduced month-end close by 3 days. Spend insights also uncovered duplicate software licenses, saving the company thousands of dollars annually.
By replacing points-based rewards with straightforward cashback, Piñata eliminated unnecessary complexity and redirected savings back into the business.
- 20 hours per month saved for the finance team
- 95% receipt compliance, up from roughly 60%
- 3 days eliminated from month-end close
- Thousands saved annually by consolidating duplicate software tools
“Switching from Brex to Ramp wasn’t just a platform swap — it was a strategic upgrade that aligned with our mission to be agile, efficient, and financially savvy.”– Lily Liu, CEO, Piñata
Snapdocs
Company | Size & Industry | Description | Pain Point |
|---|---|---|---|
Snapdocs | Mid-size | A digital platform that connects lenders and title companies to streamline the mortgage closing process. | Inefficiencies caused by too many systems. |
Challenges
The finance team at Snapdocs struggled with a fragmented expense and accounts payable setup that relied on multiple disconnected tools. Brex was used for cards, Expensify for employee reimbursements, and Bill.com for vendor payments. None of the systems integrated cleanly, forcing the team to manually sync data and reconcile transactions each month.
Approval workflows were difficult to customize, which created bottlenecks and backlogs when the wrong approvers were looped in. Month-end close required significant manual effort to ensure expenses and bills were accurately reflected in QuickBooks. The constant need to switch between systems made reconciliation slow, repetitive, and error-prone.
Key challenges included:
- Spend spread across Brex, Expensify, and Bill.com
- Manual syncing and reconciliation between systems
- Approval bottlenecks due to limited workflow customization
- 5–6 hours spent each month reconciling expenses
- Ongoing frustration with managing reimbursements and bills across tools
Solution
Snapdocs consolidated cards, reimbursements, and bill pay into a single platform by switching to Ramp. The team implemented Ramp across accounts payable, expense management, and corporate cards, with direct syncing to QuickBooks.
Centralizing spend data eliminated the need for manual reconciliation between tools. Custom approval workflows allowed Snapdocs to route expenses and reimbursements to the right approvers based on team or circumstance, reducing delays. Built-in automation and OCR streamlined bill processing and reduced the need for manual review.
- Consolidated three systems into Ramp’s single platform
- Automated syncing with QuickBooks
- Custom approval workflows for expenses and reimbursements
- OCR and automation to speed up bill processing
Results
With Ramp, Snapdocs dramatically reduced the time spent on monthly recociliation and improved visibility across spend. What previously took 5–6 hours each month now takes less than 30 minutes.
Automation and OCR reduced manual data entry and increased confidence in bill accuracy. Finance gained peace of mind knowing expenses, reimbursements, and bills were tracked in one place, while employees could respond to questions directly within the platform instead of searching through email or Slack.
Ramp also enabled Snapdocs to issue virtual cards more broadly and generate additional cash back by shifting certain vendors from ACH payments to cards.
- Saved hours of reconciliation time monthly, from 5–6 hours to under 30 minutes
- Consolidated three disparate systems into Ramp’s single platform
- Faster, more accurate bill processing through automation and OCR
- Increased cashback rewards by moving vendor spend to virtual cards
“We no longer have to comb through expense records for the whole month. Having everything in one spot has been really convenient. Ramp’s made things more streamlined and easy for us to stay on top of. It’s been a night-and-day difference.”– Fahem Islam, Accounting Associate, Snapdocs
Abode
Company | Size & Industry | Description | Pain Point |
|---|---|---|---|
Abode | SMB | A financial management platform focused on reducing the cost of homeownership through better insights and automation. | Inefficiencies caused by too many systems. |
Challenge
Before founding Abode, CEO Tyler Bliha led finance operations at a 100-person real estate startup that used Brex for spend management. Through that experience, he encountered recurring operational challenges that shaped how he built Abode’s finance stack from day one.
At his previous company, reimbursements were inefficient and difficult to manage, requiring a second tool, Expensify, alongside Brex. The split setup increased complexity, slowed workflows, and made it harder to maintain spend visibility. Card issuance and spend controls also required manual effort, making it difficult to quickly adjust limits or policies as needs changed.
Tyler also found Brex’s points-based rewards system misaligned with cost-conscious financial management. The system incentivized spending without delivering clear, tangible savings, adding friction rather than value.
Key challenges included:
- Fragmented spend management across Brex and Expensify
- Inefficient reimbursement workflows
- Manual effort required to issue cards or adjust spend controls
- Limited visibility into spend as the company scaled
- Rewards complexity without clear cost savings
Solution
When establishing Abode’s financial infrastructure, Tyler chose Ramp as a single platform to manage cards, expenses, reimbursements, and bill pay.
Ramp allowed Abode to consolidate spend management into one system with automated workflows and direct integration with QuickBooks. The team can issue cards and adjust spend limits on the fly, reducing friction for employee cardholders. Built-in expense policies and approvals helped ensure spending stayed within guardrails without requiring constant oversight.
Ramp’s onboarding process and ongoing product development also factored into the decision. Tyler prioritized a platform that would require minimal time to manage day to day while continuing to improve as the company grew.
- Consolidated cards, expenses, and reimbursements into one platform
- Simplified card issuance and spend controls
- Automated accounting sync to support faster close
- Reduced operational overhead of managing multiple finance tools
Results
With Ramp in place, Abode gained clearer visibility and tighter control over company spend while reducing the time required to manage finance operations.
Automated syncing with QuickBooks accelerated month-end close, enabling finance to review detailed spend data and draft books within days of close. Straightforward cashback replaced points-based rewards, delivering cost savings aligned with Abode’s focus on efficiency.
Ramp also gave leadership confidence that spend controls were enforced consistently as the company scaled, without slowing teams down.
- Faster month-end close supported by automated accounting sync
- Reduced time spent managing reimbursements and card controls
- Improved spend visibility and policy enforcement
- Tangible savings through straightforward cash back
“The reason I’ve been such a super fan of Ramp is the product velocity. Not only is it incredibly beneficial to the user, it also gives me confidence in your ability to continue to pull away from other products.”– Tyler Bliha, CEO, Abode
Choose a finance platform that scales with you
The teams above didn't leave Brex just to find a replacement. They needed a solution that could handle complex finance operations without creating more manual work or forcing them to patch together multiple tools.
Ramp meets that need by unifying corporate cards, expense management, reimbursements, and bill pay in one platform designed for scaling companies. With automated transaction coding, real-time policy enforcement, and comprehensive spend visibility, finance teams can prevent issues proactively rather than cleaning them up after the fact.
As your business scales, visibility, control, and stability become more valuable than rewards programs or loyalty points. Ramp remains purpose-built for growing businesses, and our product roadmap is driven directly by customer needs. With no competing priorities from traditional banks, we can ship features faster—and we’re not slowing down.
Learn why over 4,200 businesses have saved more time and money by switching from Brex to Ramp.
“Ramp gives us one structured intake, one set of guardrails, and clean data end‑to‑end— that’s how we save 20 hours/month and buy back days at close.”
David Eckstein
CFO, Vanta
“Ramp is the only vendor that can service all of our employees across the globe in one unified system. They handle multiple currencies seamlessly, integrate with all of our accounting systems, and thanks to their customizable card and policy controls, we're compliant worldwide. ”
Brandon Zell
Chief Accounting Officer, Notion
“When our teams need something, they usually need it right away. The more time we can save doing all those tedious tasks, the more time we can dedicate to supporting our student-athletes.”
Sarah Harris
Secretary, The University of Tennessee Athletics Foundation, Inc.
“Ramp had everything we were looking for, and even things we weren't looking for. The policy aspects, that's something I never even dreamed of that a purchasing card program could handle.”
Doug Volesky
Director of Finance, City of Mount Vernon
“Switching from Brex to Ramp wasn't just a platform swap—it was a strategic upgrade that aligned with our mission to be agile, efficient, and financially savvy.”
Lily Liu
CEO, Piñata
“With Ramp, everything lives in one place. You can click into a vendor and see every transaction, invoice, and contract. That didn't exist in Zip. It's made approvals much faster because decision-makers aren't chasing down information—they have it all at their fingertips.”
Ryan Williams
Manager, Contract and Vendor Management, Advisor360°
“The ability to create flexible parameters, such as allowing bookings up to 25% above market rate, has been really good for us. Plus, having all the information within the same platform is really valuable.”
Caroline Hill
Assistant Controller, Sana Benefits
“More vendors are allowing for discounts now, because they're seeing the quick payment. That started with Ramp—getting everyone paid on time. We'll get a 1-2% discount for paying early. That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars, it does add up.”
James Hardy
CFO, SAM Construction Group
