Enterprise procurement platforms promise to simplify how you manage spend. But if you're on a mid-market finance team, that complexity often creates more manual work than it eliminates, especially when travel, expenses, and AP each live in separate systems.
The finance leaders at Prosper Marketplace and Foursquare both ran Coupa alongside other tools before consolidating onto Ramp. Both teams cut hours of manual work, brought more spend under management, and stopped chasing approvals across disconnected systems.
Why finance teams are moving away from Coupa
Coupa is a spend management platform built to help you automate procurement, invoicing, and supply chain operations. It covers purchasing, contracts, approval workflows, and expense tracking, but it's built primarily for large enterprises with sprawling vendor networks.
For mid-market finance teams, though, that enterprise-level complexity often creates more friction than it solves. Coupa typically handles procurement well, but travel, expenses, and accounts payable frequently live in separate systems. When your spend is spread across three or four platforms, even routine tasks require manual work to keep everything connected.
If you've dealt with this firsthand, you're not alone. The finance teams at Prosper Marketplace and Foursquare both hit the same walls: hours each month reconciling transactions, chasing down approvals, and enforcing policies after employees had already spent out of policy. A unified platform eliminated most of that manual work, and both teams saw results quickly.
Prosper Marketplace: from three platforms to one
| Company | Size & industry | Description | Pain point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prosper Marketplace | Mid-size, financial services / fintech (600+ employees, ~25% remote) | A leading consumer lending marketplace connecting borrowers and investors; one of the first peer-to-peer lending platforms in the U.S. | A three-platform stack for procurement/AP, travel management, and expense management created broken approval chains, post-trip policy enforcement only, and 10–15 hours of monthly manual reconciliation |
The challenge
Prosper Marketplace ran procurement and accounts payable through Coupa, while travel and expenses each lived in separate platforms. The setup covered all the bases on paper. In practice, it created gaps that cost the finance team hours every month.
Approval notifications disappeared into crowded inboxes. Employees sometimes arrived at their destinations before anyone caught a failed booking. Policy enforcement only kicked in after trips were complete — by then, out-of-policy spending had already happened.
The reconciliation burden hit especially hard. With travel transactions scattered across systems, the accounting team spent 10–15 hours each month just matching expenses to trips. Meanwhile, the AP team processed over 400 bills monthly with limited automation. When bookings fell through, employees ended up putting company travel on personal credit cards.
How Ramp solved it
- Consolidated travel booking, expense management, and bill pay into a single platform, replacing three disconnected systems
- Pre-trip policy enforcement flags out-of-policy bookings before employees book — not after they return
- 90%+ bill automation across 400+ monthly bills, replacing manual AP processing
- AI-powered transaction coding that categorizes expenses without human intervention
- Integrated corporate cards eliminating the need for personal card fallback
The results
- 500+ trips booked with $0 in booking fees (vs. $10–$25 per booking from the previous TMC)
- 15% reduction in employee travel costs through pre-trip policy enforcement
- 30 hours/month reclaimed by the finance team (360 hours annually)
- 84% of transaction codings require zero human touch (13,161 of 15,732 transactions)
- Travel reconciliation: 10–15 hours/month → less than 1 hour
- 2,560 vendors managed through a single platform
"We can let Ramp be the bad cop. Finance doesn't have to chase anyone down." — Keith Frantz, Director of Enterprise Risk Management, Prosper Marketplace
Read the full Prosper Marketplace story →
Foursquare: bringing 40% of spend under management
| Company | Size & industry | Description | Pain point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foursquare | Mid-size, software & technology | Location technology company powering geospatial data, developer tools, and enterprise location intelligence products | A fragmented procurement stack left 40% of company spend unmanaged, approvals routinely stalled, and employees navigating 20-page guides just to submit a request |
The challenge
Foursquare's procurement stack had grown into a patchwork over time. Coupa handled procurement, but intake, purchase orders, accounts payable, corporate cards, and travel each ran through different tools. The result: 40% of company spend lacked any real oversight.
Employees faced a steep learning curve just to submit a request. Onboarding guides ran 20 pages long. Even then, approvals stalled with no visibility into where requests stood in the queue. Contracts routinely bypassed procurement entirely, and there was no enforcement mechanism to catch rogue spend before it happened.
"I had to go from procure to pay with no playbook. It wasn't smooth, it wasn't efficient, and nobody knew where their requests stood." — Michael Bohn, Head of Business Operations, Foursquare
How Ramp solved it
- Replaced the fragmented stack with a unified intake-to-pay platform covering procurement, AP, cards, and expense management
- Built-in spend controls requiring all purchases to route through Ramp before payment — eliminating rogue contracts
- Single approval flow with real-time status tracking, replacing the opaque multi-tool workflow
- Full vendor visibility across the entire spend stack
The results
- Spend under management: 60% → nearly 100%
- PO and invoice processing: 4x faster
- Zero rogue contracts
- 30%+ reduction in tools and software stack
- 2x+ capacity increase without adding headcount
"We chose Ramp because it replaced several disparate tools with one platform our teams actually use — if it's not in Ramp, it's not getting paid." — Michael Bohn, Head of Business Operations, Foursquare
Read the full Foursquare story →
Common challenges and what teams look for instead
The patterns across Prosper and Foursquare reveal what mid-market finance teams actually want from a spend management platform — and where enterprise-focused tools often fall short.
| Common challenge with fragmented systems | What teams look for instead |
|---|---|
| Approval notifications lost in email, causing delays and missed bookings | Real-time alerts and approvals within a single platform |
| Policy enforcement only after spending occurs | Pre-transaction controls that block out-of-policy spend before it happens |
| Hours spent reconciling travel, expenses, and AP across separate tools | Automatic matching and categorization that eliminates manual reconciliation |
| Employees forced onto personal cards when systems fail | Integrated corporate cards tied directly to travel and expense workflows |
| No visibility into where requests stand in approval queues | Clear status tracking from request through payment |
| Rogue spend and contracts bypassing procurement | Unified intake-to-pay workflow where nothing gets paid outside the system |
Why a unified platform beats a fragmented stack
The finance teams at Prosper and Foursquare didn't switch because Coupa couldn't handle procurement. They switched because managing spend across disconnected systems created manual work, work that disappears when everything lives in one place. When travel, expenses, AP, and procurement share a single platform, reconciliation disappears, and your team gets time back for forecasting, analysis, and planning.
See how it works for yourself with an interactive demo. Or explore more customer stories from finance teams who've made the switch.
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