Spotlight: Quanta delivers faster, more accurate accounting with Ramp

Over 25,000 businesses run their financial operations on Ramp. Today, we’re opening up the Ramp platform to allow companies to not just run on our software, but build on it. With the launch of Ramp’s App Center, technology partners can now access rich transactional metadata to build apps that extend their core product offerings and grow their user base. Together, we can help mutual customers solve more financial operations challenges.

Technology partners are already using Ramp API to expand the capabilities and reach of their products. We're excited to share what they’ve been building, starting with Quanta, an accounting software provider that provides a suite of products and services to drive real-time insights. Here’s a deeper look at the integration it built and its experience working with the API.

About Quanta

Quanta gives its customers a comprehensive, real-time view of their business finances with its all-in-one platform that offers bookkeeping, tax preparation, and financial dashboard.

Q&A with Fidel Salgado

We asked Fidel Salgado, Quanta’s founding engineer, to share more about what it was like building with the Ramp API and the results he’s seen from the partnership.

What is Quanta?

Quanta is an accounting system and service provider, dedicated to helping companies gain real-time clarity into their financial data and business performance. Many of our customers use Ramp for spend management, meaning a big part of our work involves recording and understanding their employees' transactions on Ramp. The Ramp API allows us to offer rich insights into their data and retain transaction context.

What made you decide to use the Ramp API?

It’s always been important to us to be as compatible as possible with our customers' technology ecosystems. Since many of our customers are Ramp users, integrating with the platform was an obvious decision. Our vision is to build an accounting system that provides richer insights to our users than the last generation of accounting software, and the Ramp API has helped us deliver on that promise.

How are you using the Ramp API?

Without the API, users would need to download CSVs and upload them into Quanta—a poor user experience resulting in large amounts of manual work and an incomplete financial picture.

We use Ramp’s balance and statement APIs to verify that the balances within Quanta are correct automatically. Without an API, this would be done by hand, leaving too much room for error and wasting valuable time.

How much time did it take to integrate with Ramp?

Ramp’s documentation and intuitive API design made integration seamless. Within a few hours, we successfully pulled our first transactions into the developer environment! We built and launched a minimum viable product several weeks later, a record milestone.

“Ramp’s documentation and intuitive API design made integration very easy for us. Within only a couple hours, we were successfully pulling our first transactions in the developer environment! In just a few weeks, we built a launchable MVP integration.” - Fidel Salgado, Founding Engineer, Quanta

How does the Ramp API compare to other APIs?

While we have built integrations with dozens of tools in the finance ecosystem, Ramp’s API was one of the quickest to onboard. The intuitive design, clear and standard use of OAuth, and ability to easily search through documentation result in massive efficiencies.

Most notably, Ramp makes it incredibly simple for developers to integrate their accounting systems. With very little effort, we uploaded all of our general ledger accounts, enabling our mutual customers to fully use Ramp’s accounting module with Quanta’s data. Ramp also exposes balances for statements, both pending and settled amounts, as well as reimbursement balances, making reconciliation a breeze—many providers don’t get this granular. Don’t get us started on comparing Ramp to the corporate card providers that don’t have an API!

How has Ramp benefitted your customers?

The number one benefit is Ramp’s great data quality. Without any manual lift, our customers can automatically link all purchases to the reason behind those purchases, as well as any supporting documentation. This capability helps with the visualizations and context that Quanta can provide, allowing for faster turnaround. Additionally, we work with users who have set up a bank account, but don’t yet have a corporate card. The integration between Quanta and Ramp allows these users to easily access and sign up for Ramp without any extra steps.

Since moving to the new implementation powered by Ramp API, we’ve witnessed several memorable customer experiences. For example, one customer who switched to Quanta from a previous accounting provider had incorrect data related to Ramp’s transactions in their accounting system. Using the API, we immediately identified the issues and corrected them. Without an API, we would have had to comb through thousands of transactions by hand.

How has the Ramp API allowed Quanta to scale and grow?

With the Ramp API, we’ve become a much more attractive product to existing Ramp users, including many tech-forward companies that care about finance automation and saving time.

Our users now have a seamless, one-click integration into Ramp. They can immediately see all of the general ledger accounts they have in Quanta in Ramp. Conversely, they can automatically sync and access their Ramp transactions in Quanta. Because we can use the API to verify that the balances in Ramp match the balances in our accounting system, we have full confidence that the data is never out of sync.

We can leverage all of the rich data Ramp provides in the API to give our users the clearest possible picture of their finances.

Choose a better way to build

Ready to become a Ramp developer? Join the community of technology partners already building and publishing third-party apps to the Ramp App Center. By powering your product with Ramp’s spend management functionality, you can now give your customers access to more actionable insights and engage thousands of other businesses already on Ramp.

Sign up to become a technology partner today.