How Shortcut uses Ramp to close its books 5x faster

When Shortcut, formerly Clubhouse, was a small startup, managing spend was relatively simple. As the company scaled and more of the team needed to be able to spend on its behalf, spend management became more complicated. 

Shortcut was using outdated expense management tools and manually reconciling expense reports. Each month, team members wasted hours chasing receipts and filing reports. Even with this investment of time and attention, they were still unable to accurately track all employees’ expenses. Expense reports were regularly months late, inaccurate, and missing receipts and proper approvals. 

"There wasn’t really any visibility on what employees were spending on and how much, so there was no control over when the sync would occur. This lack of visibility led to a timely, inefficient, and inaccurate process."

- Shafak Ilyas, Senior Accountant at Shortcut

Shortcut’s existing spend management system relied heavily on outdated tools, manual effort, and employees’ time. To improve the spend management process, they used Ramp to deploy a fully automated accounting system. 

Ramp streamlined Shortcut’s expense management process by easily syncing with existing accounting vendor QuickBooks. In a matter of minutes, Ramp was able to map Shortcut’s chart of accounts and set up a seamless, centralized accounting system between QuickBooks and Ramp. 

“Getting started with Ramp was extremely quick and painless. We were able to connect our bank accounts and start inviting team members within a day.”

- Shafak Ilyas, Senior Accountant at Shortcut

As part of this new system, Shortcut began reconciling transactions in real-time. Rather than counting on employees to manually track and reconcile purchases, Ramp automatically collects and matches receipts and memos from company cardholders via email or SMS. This has saved Shortcut countless hours of employee time. 

The system has empowered all employees to make purchases on behalf of the company with confidence. Managers issue cards directly to employees, and they can impose daily, monthly or yearly spending limits, as well as adding controls at the point-of-use to ensure all spending is approved. 

Automation has not only saved time and streamlined processes–it has also cut costs. Ramp provided Shortcut a customized Savings Audit that identified wasteful company spend, for example on duplicate software subscriptions. With greater visibility into spend patterns, Shortcut can keep costs down and efficiency high.

Ramp has given Shortcut unprecedented control and visibility over its corporate spend. Managers can see what individuals and teams are purchasing with a simple click, and finance teams can now review and plan for approved expenses in advance. 

Automation benefits Shortcut’s long-term planning and strategy as well as its daily operations. By automating the process of requesting, reviewing, and verifying spend, Shortcut now closes its books 5x faster. 

“With Ramp, everything is quicker. I can sync whenever I want. Closing the books used to take a couple of days, and now it takes about an hour a month.”

- Shafak Ilyas, Senior Accountant at Shortcut

For a fast-growing company, those kinds of savings serve as fuel for growth.