How Ramp helped Apprentice.io modernize accounting with automation

Though Apprentice’s mission is to make processes easier and more efficient for life sciences companies, its own financial operations weren’t always as streamlined. The company’s legacy corporate credit card system was no system at all -- Apprentice had cards centralized with a few executives, and no ERP. 

“It was a lot of emails and an old-school mentality,” says controller, Oscar Lobo. “That could work in a mom and pop shop with 10 people, but once you’re getting to 100 employees, you need to change your way of thinking.”

When Oscar joined Apprentice, he immediately signed up for a bank card program coupled with an expense management system -- but he still found himself and his team spending extra hours on manual reconciliation. “I realized I increased my staff accountant’s workload by signing up for the banking program,” he says. “I started thinking: is how I’m operating my accounting outdated? I’m not using AI anywhere. Maybe I’m blind to certain things.”

Oscar embraced the challenge of modernizing both his thinking and the accounting function and began considering how he could leverage AI to automate some of Apprentice’s more time-consuming manual processes. 

In his quest to streamline the accounting process, Oscar had a Zoom session with the team at Ramp -- and he quickly went all-in. 

“What really sold me is the platform,” he says. He notes that the finance department at Apprentice has multiple functions benefiting from the Ramp platform: procurement, credit cards, reimbursement, bill pay, AP, and approvals. “You need something to connect all this,” says Oscar. “That was what was always missing for me. At Ramp, it was already there.”

The Ramp platform, Oscar notes, also creates a front-end experience that empowers employees to self-serve, reducing the manual work for accountants. “Now employees have access to the front-end, while the back-end remains protected, which is critical for auditing.” 

For Apprentice, the comprehensive end-to-end system that empowered employees and accountants alike was the true value of the Ramp platform.

Since implementing Ramp, the Apprentice finance team has seen a marked shift in both the speed with which accounting happens and the oversight they have over corporate spend. “I’m like a forensic accountant with the Slack integration,” jokes Oscar. “I sit here and watch people all day. I love it.” 

Truly, though, the real-time visibility Ramp offers has enabled Oscar and his team to gain better oversight over spend and offer help when they need to. “I can see everything that’s going on, and I can come in and be helpful, or be preventative, or I can help with coding to minimize the work on our end,” says Oscar. 

“When thinking about the time savings in switching to Ramp, it can honestly seem a bit overstated, but I assure you, it is not,” says Justin Foreman, Director of Revenue Operations at Apprentice. He attributes significant time-savings to the platform’s usability, noting that he has personally shifted from submitting expense reports on a monthly basis to an ongoing one, because the system makes doing so easy. “I used to plan 3-4 hours at minimum each month to submit expense reports,” he says. “With Ramp, my total time for expenses is less than one hour per month, if that.”

The efficiency gained has resulted in time savings for the department and the company, which is crucial for small teams. “Ramp has resulted in huge time savings for month-end close, etc.,” says Oscar. “But also -- we’re not hiring. So the ability to have essentially an accounting bot is incredible -- the more you can automate, the more time you have to do other stuff.” 

By shifting some of the more tedious manual tasks to Ramp, Apprentice has also been able to create a more compelling work environment for its current employees. “You want to retain your people,” Oscar notes. “I don’t want to have to rehire somebody because they’re bored. If they’re busy just doing manual labor, they’re not challenged.” 

In addition to saving time for the finance team, Ramp’s AI-powered Price Intelligence has helped save real costs. "We’re consolidating systems, and that’s saving us money,” says Oscar. “But on top of that, Ramp is uncovering savings opportunities for me like 'hey, if you switch this vendor to an annual plan, you’ll save money.' It’s already saved us $6,000 just on little things like that.”

That spend visibility has saved costs, and it’s also enabled better budgeting and planning. “The ability to have data in a presentable format in the palm of your hand without all the financial gymnastics we would normally have to do is amazing,” says Oscar. “I can’t speak enough about that capability.”

It’s been hugely helpful for Oscar and his team to empower non-finance employees with that information. “Giving ownership of a spend program to someone used to take hours for our team,” he says, noting that finance would need to extract and synthesize information, make it presentable, and review it with the spend program owner. “Now they have access to that data, and they can come up with questions in advance of our meeting. When they do come to me, they come informed. It makes our conversations more actionable.”

That access has helped cultivate a company-wide culture of cost-consciousness that didn’t exist before Ramp. “There’s a community-type feeling of helping the company achieve its goal,” says Oscar. “And it’s a lot easier to think about things you might not have considered before: like maybe I shouldn’t eat at this restaurant or take this Uber, because it sounds pricey. Now the system forces you to take a pause.”

Since deploying Ramp, Oscar no longer feels like a dinosaur with an old-school system. “I saw a quote about how the cost of inaction now outweighs the cost of modernizing finance,” he says. “If you don’t modernize now, what will it cost you in the future?”