How Clearbit closed the books >60% faster with Ramp + NetSuite

Clearbit’s lean accounting team has a lot on its collective plate—and a core priority is ensuring the accounting function runs smoothly. 

“Typically that’s going to mean having a really clean month-end close…and then making sure that those systems in our accounting tech stack are speaking to each other efficiently in the way that we need them to,” explains Clearbit Accounting Manager Kay Coolican. “And then all of those things roll up into a broader reporting function. So all of this data needs to be correct…we need to make sure we’re booking things the way we need to book them, so we can track our expenses more closely.” Because the company oversaw approximately 1,000 transactions per month, manual coding was an incredibly time-intensive process.

Clearbit’s legacy corporate card provider was not enabling the smooth operation the company required. “At the end of the day, our close cycle was just being blown out so dramatically because of extra steps that provider’s model created,” says Kay. The legacy provider required upfront funding, which forced Clearbit to take the additional manual step of reconciling a clearing account.

Moreover, the clunky integration on the part of their legacy card provider meant that it took multiple days for transactions to show up in NetSuite, which added at least two business days to the end-of-month close process. The accounting team found itself constantly scrambling to close the books at month-end, undergoing a frustrating, time-consuming manual process that required the attention of three accountants. On average, month-end close took about 10 days.

Clearbit’s legacy provider did not automate data coding, required multiple layers of reconciliation, and, most importantly, did not integrate smoothly with NetSuite, Clearbit’s accounting system. 

“When we were evaluating other solutions, we were looking at what was going to integrate effectively with NetSuite,” says Kay. “How easy is the solution to deploy? Is it something that our employees are going to be able to pick up easily?”

Clearbit needed a single-system solution that could easily integrate with other technologies and reduce the time and effort needed to complete monthly accounting.

The accounting team needed a corporate card solution that could communicate quickly and easily with NetSuite. They also needed a way to automate transaction coding so they could expeditiously review Clearbit’s high volume of card-based transactions (i.e., approximately 1,000 transactions per month). 

The team was drawn to Ramp largely for the promise of its seamless NetSuite integration. “Integrations with our existing tech stack made Ramp a natural fit—inherently that saves us time and money because of the cost associated with investing and onboarding other solutions,” says Kay. “Ramp is literally plug-and-play with NetSuite, and it’s free to use.”

Activating the Ramp platform was quick and easy. “They had quoted us one to two months,” says Kay. “We did it in two weeks. It was really, really quick—and we had no issues.”

Right away, the team was able to reduce its reliance on manual coding and ensure a more accurate flow of data from Ramp to NetSuite. “I think we would be lost without Ramp’s categorization and coding,” says Kay. “It can be error-prone to do something so manual. You can make a lot of mistakes. When we're trying to be tight on cash and tight on budgeting, we need to make sure everything is coming through clean.”

Ramp’s NetSuite integration immediately streamlined processes for the Clearbit team. Through this integration, 100% of transactions are automatically coded. The card programs have transactions mapped into the appropriate general ledgers, which helps further automate accounting workflows and the month-end close process. That automation doesn’t remove control from the Clearbit team, however. Kay and her team can quickly and easily override Ramp’s coding should the need arise, and the changes they make seamlessly sync with NetSuite.

By deploying Ramp and leveraging its NetSuite integration, Clearbit empowered its accounting team to work on strategic, value-additive work, as opposed to tedious and time-consuming manual bookkeeping and reconciliation. Automating Clearbit’s highly manual categorization and coding process ultimately reduced costs, enabled the company to keep headcount tight, and expedited time to close.

“Before, month-end close took approximately 10 days,” says Kay. “Now, it’s unbelievable—it takes three to four days.” 

Ramp not only reduces time to close—it also gives the accounting team more granular insight over company spend. “If we were to export transaction details, it’s really easy to pull a bunch of different metrics,” says Kay. “We use that type of analysis to show ad spend, for example.” If, for example, the marketing team spends $80K on Facebook ads one month and $120K the next, the insights Ramp provides enables the team to dig into that discrepancy. “It’s really easy for us to identify who owns the spend and whom we have to talk to in order to understand the change,” says Kay. 

Plus, Ramp’s 1.5% cashback feature could actually turn corporate expenditures into cost-savings for Clearbit. To date, Clearbit has saved well over $50K by using Ramp—$50K in product savings, and $6.1K through insights.  

The reimbursement process, too, has been seamless with Ramp. “I don’t ever have somebody coming to me asking how to submit a reimbursement,” she says. “It is so easy for people to hop in here and do this, and I have had multiple compliments from people I barely even speak with just going out of their way to tell me how easy it is to use Ramp.”

That ease of use characterizes Clearbit’s experience deploying Ramp and its NetSuite integration, and it supports the accounting team’s overarching goal of smooth, efficient operation. “I think it’s really important for software to act as an extension of our department,” says Kay. “And I think Ramp is very, very good at that.”

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