Marqeta closes its books 88% faster with Ramp + Sage

A major priority for Marqeta’s finance team is creating a process that drives efficiency and reduces closing timelines. This, in turn, will help the company’s financial reporting team and allow them to shift away from manual, repetitive work and allow for a greater focus on analysis. 

“We don’t want our teams to be doing manual work all the time,” says Megan Gemoll, Director of Corporate Accounting. “We want to take that out of the process so we can focus more on analysis, whether that be month over month fluxes or better ways to inform and help the business rather than spending all of our time doing data entry.” 

Marqeta’s legacy corporate card management system did not allow for the efficiency, automation, and analysis that were so valuable to the finance team. “Our previous corporate credit card program was very manual,” says Megan. “Every month we were doing a manual journal entry to upload all of our credit card transactions. There was no way for us to track who had and hadn’t submitted receipts.”

The finance team was constantly tracking down these rogue receipts and spending hours manually closing and reconciling the books. This precluded the team from spending their time on higher-value analytical initiatives.

Megan and her team knew they needed a better solution for corporate card management and found Ramp. 

“[Ramp] was a solution we knew we could definitely work with and get behind, and it would solve our biggest pain points with corporate cards,” says Megan. 

In its initial rollout, Marqeta issued cards to five employees, including the head executive assistant, who frequently dealt with multiple transactions. Eventually, the team issued more cards to additional team members, and now anyone who needs a card can receive one through Ramp. During the onboarding process, Megan had weekly feedback calls with the Ramp team. “The Ramp team not only took feedback well, but actively sought it out, which was truly appreciated,” says Megan. 

It was important that Ramp would integrate seamlessly with the rest of the finance team’s tech stack, which includes Sage Intacct. Historically, the lack of integration between Intacct and Marqeta’s legacy card provider had contributed to the manual effort of the finance team. “That was one of the requirements of any program we decided to go with,” says Megan. “We needed to have an automated solution to get those accounting entries in. [Ramp] is very user-friendly, and just self-explanatory to get all of those things connected.”

Ramp’s Sage integration has helped the Marqeta finance team achieve its objectives of reducing manual effort, increasing efficiency, and shifting employees’ time from rote tasks to analysis. 

“I would probably say we’re saving about seven hours a month,” says Megan. “Our AP specialist was probably spending eight hours a month just getting everything in for the corporate cards. Now he’s probably spending one hour a month. That’s definitely significant time-saving for him, because every hour counts during close.”

Ramp’s features, including merchant category rules, have been helpful in pre-coding, accounting, and the month-end close process. For example, multiple employees use LinkedIn for different purposes at Marqeta, which had previously led to various codes for different transactions. 

“It was super helpful to be able to create that rule, so we didn’t have to go into every LinkedIn transaction and change the coding from whatever the default was to our advertising account,” says Megan. “It just does that automatically now.”

By saving time and reducing time to close, the Marqeta accounting team has been able to spend more time on deeper analysis and let Ramp automatically categorize and sync transactions directly to Sage Intacct. 

“Instead of spending hours getting all of the corporate card transactions in manually, they now automatically sync over,” says Megan. “We’re able to review our expenses much faster in the close process and analyze them. We’re able to start those analytics in our month-over-month analytics even before the month ends, because those transactions are importing over regularly.”

That allows the accounting team to start their process earlier, close their books faster, and have a quicker review process. For a fast-growing, highly efficient team, that ability is critical.