How the country's largest immigration law firm saved millions replacing legacy corporate cards
“Our old card provider required hours on the phone every week just to keep things running. With Ramp, that entire category of work is gone. I spend that time on things that actually move the firm.”
CFO
Wayne Robinson had a recurring appointment he never put on his calendar. A few times each week, the CFO of the country's largest immigration-focused law firm would pick up the phone and call his bank. Sometimes to dispute an unauthorized charge. Sometimes to order a replacement card. Sometimes just to find out why a transaction had been declined.
"I used to have to call our card provider and sit on the phone for a couple hours a week," he says. "I don't have to do that with Ramp ever."
Issuing corporate cards to hundreds of employees at once might have seemed like a risky and arduous implementation. But the rollout took just weeks. Both American Express and Bank of America were replaced in a single pass across five U.S. offices and international back offices.
From day one, every card was locked to a purpose, spend was finally visible in real time, all with controls that would have previously had to have been retroactively enforced.
Corporate cards and expense management then gave way to accounts payable — until all of the firm's spend management was consolidated in Ramp, synced directly with Sage ERP. Transaction coding that had required manual review now flowed into the general ledger automatically, and month-end close shrank from a weeks-long reconciliation exercise to something the team could manage in just a few days. Ramp became the firm’s finance infrastructure, making it possible to support the growing volume that came with a business doubling year over year.
Two weeks for a card. Hours on hold. Fifteen thousand transactions coded by hand.
Every month, the accounting team processed thousands of card transactions: government filing fees, FedEx shipments, USPS charges, administrative fees paid to federal agencies on behalf of clients. With no automation in place, every line had to be coded by hand.
"There was no way we were going to be able to manually code everything, and the only way to code with our legacy providers was manually,” Wayne explains. “There was no way we could handle that kind of volume with our existing credit card solution."
The root of the problem was structural. The founding partner and a handful of executives carried American Express cards. Everyone else either made purchases on their own cards to submit reimbursement requests or borrowed a colleague's when they needed to make a purchase. Getting a new card from Bank of America meant a two-week wait for a physical piece of plastic.
"A lot of employees were just sharing corporate cards" says Delmarie Torres, the firm's accountant, "because requesting cards from our bank takes more time."
The problems extended beyond the accounting team. "The person managing payroll had to remember who needed to be reimbursed during each payroll period," Wayne says. "It would take employees two-plus weeks to get paid back for every transaction they might personally pay for."
"With the kind of volume we have, we need both productivity and quality assurance as we try to remove as many manual parts as we can," says Wayne. "I started looking for an automated solution, because I couldn't hire enough people to code 15,000 transactions a month."
Not just a better corporate card. A better way to run finance.
Not just a better card. A better way to run finance.
What Wayne needed for the firm wasn't just a new corporate credit card. Neither AmEx nor Bank of America could give a 600-person firm what it actually required: the ability to issue virtual cards instantly, lock them to specific vendors, automate the transaction coding consuming his team's hours, and see every dollar in real time before it became a problem.
Every card, locked to a purpose
Ramp did all of that. The firm replaced both card systems in a single rollout, issuing purpose-built virtual cards for every recurring vendor payment: dedicated cards for FedEx shipments, USPS fees, and payments to governmental agencies, each locked to a specific merchant or category. A compromised card number became effectively useless.
"The biggest benefit is the ability to have more control over where the cards are used and for what kinds of expenses," Wayne says. "With our explosion of employees, Ramp has enabled us to set up a lot of virtual cards for specific purposes or for vendors we use daily, which has greatly reduced time spent coding."
For the first time, the finance team had real-time visibility into department spending without waiting for month-end. The accounting team could now set restrictions on individual cards the moment an employee was onboarded, not after a problem surfaced.
From cards to a full financial platform
The card rollout was the start. As controls and automation proved out, the firm expanded Ramp to cover employee reimbursements and accounts payable, consolidating financial operations that had previously lived across disconnected systems.
The accounting team can drag an invoice into Ramp. Ramp reads the vendor information, populates the required fields, and for existing vendors, ACH details are already stored.
The last piece was the Sage integration. With Ramp synced directly to the general ledger, coded transactions, bills, and reimbursements flow into Sage automatically — no manual exports, no end-of-month reconciliation sprint. The spend that happens during the week is in the books before the week is out.
The firm kept growing. The finance work stopped growing with it.
In a few short months after the rollout, vendor-locked virtual cards and merchant category controls had effectively closed the financial exposure the firm's previous model for corporate cards and reimbursements had created. Spend that had once required hours of weekly phone calls to manage now operated in the background, automatically.
Every employee got a card. Every transaction became traceable.
Wayne's recurring calls with the bank simply stopped. No more disputed charges to escalate, no replacement cards to request, no declined transactions to troubleshoot. The vendor-locked virtual cards were doing the work instead: a card issued for FedEx shipments couldn't be used anywhere else; a card for government filing fees was useless to anyone without the right merchant code. Within the first six months on Ramp, unauthorized spend dropped to near zero.
The accountability shift ran deeper than the numbers. For Torres, the end of shared cards meant the end of month-end guesswork. Every transaction was now traceable to the person who made it, with receipts and memos attached in real time rather than reconstructed weeks later.
88% of transactions coded automatically. 117 hours of accounting work reclaimed every month.
The efficiency gains compounded from there. With Ramp, 88% of transaction coding happens automatically and 99% of approval requests require no manual intervention from employees or managers. The rule-based coding that had once consumed the accounting team's hours now runs in the background, applied at the moment of purchase. For a firm processing thousands of transactions at peak, the effect on month-end close was material: 117 hours of reconciliation, coding review, and processing that no longer land in anyone's queue.
On the AP side, the gains extended to bill pay. Torres now drags an invoice into Ramp; the platform reads vendor information via OCR, populates the required fields, and for existing vendors, pulls stored ACH details automatically. Sixty-nine percent of bills are now processed this way, saving another 12 hours per month that had previously required manual data entry.
Since joining Ramp in late 2022, the firm has accumulated over $4.5 million in total savings from cashback earned on card spend and spend controls that blocked or denied unauthorized transactions before they could compound.
