How Ramp made life easier for Adrift Hospitality

Adrift’s legacy expense management system was complicated and tedious. “We had around 10 people with credit cards, and we had to manage a lot of petty cash at properties for running to the store,” says COO Beck Blasko. Because so few people had their own card, a large volume of spend was concentrated in a few cardholders -- and that necessitated significant time and effort tracking and coding transactions each month. “Coding and reconciling transactions for the whole month was one of my least favorite tasks,” says Beck. While Adrift tried to implement a receipt-tracking process, it wasn’t easy or thorough. As a result, the company was unable to collect all its receipts. 

“We didn’t have a great process for turning in receipts,” says Beck. “There was likely fraud of some kind that we either didn’t know about or was accidental.” Adrift knew it needed to make changes, but its legacy systems couldn’t support the volume of transactions the team was making. “If you’ve worked in the hospitality industry, you know that GMs and managers do not have time to sit down every month and spend hours coding,” says Beck.

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Adrift partnered with Ramp to streamline its cumbersome expense management system and automate its time-intensive manual processes. With Ramp, Adrift can easily code expenses to gain a granular overview of corporate spend. With Adrift as the operating company, each of its properties has its own income statement and, now, associated Ramp code. 

The company leverages automatically coded virtual cards for recurring monthly transactions. “Those are really brilliant,” says Beck. “Nobody even has to think about them and when someone leaves, you don’t have to worry about changing any of the billing.” 

In an industry noted for high turnover, these automations -- and, indeed, the ease of switching and issuing cards -- make life easier for the organization. “Before, the owner had to manage changing cards and issuing new ones,” says Beck. “With Ramp, multiple people can manage it and alleviate pressure from the owner.” Virtual cards allow business as usual to continue, even before new physical cards have arrived in the mail. “I was managing our facilities team a year ago, and one of our managers who had been with us for five years left,” says Beck. “All of our external contractors and plumbers, electricians, TV, recurring monthly bills were in his name. With Ramp I didn’t have to scramble to change them, because many were on virtual cards.”

Ramp enables Adrift to implement and monitor spend policies. “We do have policies around how much you can spend before requiring approval at each level,” says Beck. “There’s definitely a lot of value in Ramp’s approval process.” 

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Deploying Ramp has allowed the finance and operations team to breathe a collective sigh of relief. “There’s nothing about it that makes our life harder,” says Beck. “It makes everything easier.” The company no longer worries about fraud, and GMs and managers no longer have to spend hours coding their transactions. “They’re able to do it right away, and they even get a text message reminder,” says Beck. “It makes it so they don’t have to think about it except when they’re completing the purchase -- then, it’s done.” 

Even the simple fact of not having to manage petty cash has infused time-savings and efficiency into the organization. “All of those 15-minute things add up,” says Beck. 

The result of that time-savings is greater attention given to the more strategic aspects of company management. “Not having to focus on things that take up a lot of time, like coding hundreds of transactions every month, allows our GMs to have time to review the financials on a monthly basis and dig into why or what they were spending their money on,” says Beck. “They now have the ability to be a little more strategic and with that regained time.”

Ramp’s insights and analysis can bolster that strategic thinking. “Ramp has been really helpful with our budgeting,” says Beck. “Now we can easily search for transactions, and we can clearly see where we’re at for monthly spend and how much more we have to spend for the coming weeks.” With Ramp, Adrift has been able to switch from a reactive approach to budgeting to a proactive one.

Ultimately, these gains in efficiency have positioned the company for future expansion. “It’s difficult to think about growing if your current systems are not sustainable,” says Beck. “You can’t scale with hundreds of paper receipts dropped off on your desk.” With Ramp, Adrift no longer needs to worry about that. 

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