How Boys & Girls Clubs of America improved efficiency, gained visibility over spend, and regained lost time with Ramp

40 hours/month
saved for finance team
Cut reimbursement time
from weeks to 1-2 days
10 hours/month
saved with UKG real time sync
The problem
A frustrating and time-intensive expense management process
Each team at BGCA – from youth development programming to accounting – is united by a collective commitment to the organization’s mission: To enable all young people, especially those who need us most, to reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens. “Serving the Boys & Girls Clubs and being part of a mission that is positively impacting youth across the country is tremendously rewarding,” says BGCA VP Controller, Jason Penegar. “For someone like myself, who works within finance, the best day we can have is when we provide excellent service to our colleagues. Our mission in accounting is to provide continuous support to make things seamless and efficient for our staff, so they can focus on supporting those local clubs and the youth in our nation, as well as ensuring that  we’re holding ourselves to the highest accountability of being responsible stewards of our finances and other resources.”

Jason’s goal, then, is to focus the finance team’s time on value-additive activities, responsiveness, and strategic priorities, and to devise systems and processes that are intuitive and efficient for the entire organization.

Under its legacy system, BGCA didn’t have a single sign-on, which resulted in frequent system lockouts. New hires had trouble completing their initial expense reports unassisted, which created frustration and friction within the finance team and led to multiple password resets. These burdens yielded numerous challenges with late expense reports, which impacted the finance team’s month-end close process. “Previously with our TE expenses, it was a cumbersome, inefficient process,” says Jason.

Jason needed a more efficient system – not simply in service of offering a better experience to his colleagues so they could focus their efforts on assisting youth in need, but also because strong internal controls and oversight is mission-critical to BGCA.

“As a not-for-profit, we’re inherently constrained,” Jason explains. “There’s always a scarcity of resources on the financial front, which amplifies the need to ensure we have strong financial controls and oversight to maximize the benefit of those resources on our mission.”
Company name
Boys & Girls Clubs of America
Industry
Nonprofit
Company size
Enterprise
Pain point
Manual reconciliation or coding
About the company
For more than 160 years, Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BCGA.org) has provided a safe place for kids and teens to learn and grow. Local Clubs offer a safe space with caring adult mentors, fun and friendship, and high-impact youth development programs on a daily basis during critical non-school hours. Boys & Girls Clubs programming supports kids and teens academic work, promotes good character and leadership, and healthy lifestyles. Over 5,400 Clubs serve more than 3 million young people through Club membership and community outreach. Clubs are located in cities, towns, public housing and on Native lands throughout the country. Also, serving military families in BGCA-affiliated Youth Centers on U.S. military installations worldwide. The national headquarters is located in Atlanta, GA. Learn more about Boys & Girls Clubs of America on Facebook and X.
The solution
An automated, consolidated expense management platform to drive efficiency and improve employee experience

BGCA partnered with Ramp to unleash an expense management system that could be both effective and efficient. With Ramp’s centralized, automated platform, Jason and his team began to automate some of the previously manual financial tasks – including expense reporting, coding, and accounting – that had consumed so much time. 

Ramp’s mobile app makes it easy for card holders to submit their expenses directly from their phones. “That has been really well-received,” says Jason. “They can submit their expenses through Ramp in real-time, which has been a real value-add.”

Ramp’s ability to integrate with BGCA’s existing tech stack was a key reason the organization pursued the partnership. “The integration with UKG, our HR information system, has created significant time savings for our finance team,” says Jason. “It allows us to really focus on more value-additive activities.” 

From the start, onboarding with Ramp has been a positive experience for the BGCA team – a surprisingly delightful outcome. “As a finance leader, I’ve seen financial implementations crash and burn,” notes Jason. “I’m pleased to say that the Ramp journey has been incredible – a flawless implementation that was recently recognized with a round of applause at one of our national meetings.” 

Indeed, BGCA staff embraced Ramp’s widespread adoption across the organization. “We were keenly interested in mitigating risk, so we decided to pursue a small pilot for our Ramp implementation,” says Jason. “It was so well-received that other departments were asking to join the pilot because of the improved experience our card holders were realizing through Ramp.”

The result
Increased efficiency and mission-affirming time savings

With Ramp, the team now has more time to devote to business decisions and overarching strategy. “A great impact of Ramp has been the time-savings,” says Jason. “For my colleagues outside of finance, we’ve shortened the time commitment for submitting expense reports and have allowed them to repurpose that time so they can focus more on our local clubs and the youth we serve in our mission.” 

The finance team, too, has realized significant time-savings. “We’ve saved 40 hours a month in card holder and credit card administration,” says Jason.

Jason and his team plan to continue adopting technologies like Ramp that better enable their colleagues to deliver critical mission-aligned services to youth in need. “When we were looking to make a move to Ramp, we considered the opportunity cost of not changing from our existing system,” says Jason. “Ultimately, maximizing the impact of the scarcest resource we have in our organization – people’s time – drove us to move to Ramp and leverage that technology.”

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