“Just do it:” How Bratjen Construction Modernized Processes, Saved Time, and Improved Accuracy with Ramp

When Bratjen founders Ben and Jared started the company, they handled almost everything -- construction projects, business strategy, human resources, and payroll and accounting. “That was fine when there were 10 people,” says Director of Operations Michael Irvin. “But now that we’ve gotten bigger, with quite a number of projects under our belt and more to come, there’s only so much they can do.” Hampered by a lack of bandwidth and time-intensive processes, the founders tasked Michael with analyzing and improving efficiency regarding those processes.

“As we started hiring more employees, I was noticing little frustrations that would pop up with our people,” says Michael. “I didn’t want us to start losing quality people because we weren’t focusing on the small things that could really make a difference.”

One of those seemingly small things was expense management. “The only people who had cards were the two owners,” says Michael. “We were using our company file share system and passing documents between our accounting team and AP. There was a limited approval process, and it was more of a trust-based system.” When employees needed to make a purchase, they had to make their requests directly to the founders. “We had our own Excel expense report, where you could list the job number that you were charging to and the reason,” says Michael. “It irritated some employees, and it was time-consuming.” 

Reconciling expenses was similarly time-consuming and took Bratjen’s office manager upwards of two weeks. “There was limited monitoring, no categorization,” says Michael. “It took a really long time.”  

Historically, Bratjen had a similarly protracted bill pay process. “Whenever an invoice came through our accounting email, our office manager would have to grab the project manager if it was over a certain amount,” Michael explains. “It was a lot of back and forth, and PDF manipulation, and it took a lot of time.”

Bratjen partnered with Ramp to modernize its expense management system, and in so doing the company overhauled several other accounting processes. 

“Now that we have Ramp, pretty much all of our leadership team and all our project managers have company cards,” says Michael. Ramp makes it easy to set specific parameters and spending limits by employee, vendor, or job -- which both reduces the burden on Michael and his team and gives them more control over corporate spend. 

While Bratjen originally used Ramp just for corporate card management, the team quickly began taking advantage of Ramp’s Bill Pay feature. “If an invoice is $500-1000, it’s paid automatically,” says Michael. “But if it’s over $1,000, it will alert the project manager and prompt them to confirm the expense.” Higher-ticket items that exceed $5,000 are automatically routed to a senior project manager for approval. “It’s really helped with communication,” says Michael. “There have been a few instances where Ramp flags an invoice, and we realize we don’t need to be paying it. Before, we would have had to make the payment, then figure out how to recoup that money back.”

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Ramp has simplified Bratjen’s formerly fragmented manual systems to create easier, more accurate AP processes. With Ramp, Bratjen can easily create and assign invoices to accounting categories, phase codes, and projects. “Before we would have to pay an invoice and mark up a PDF with all that information,” says Michael. “Now everything’s just a click of a button.”

Automating tedious manual processes has resulted in improved user experience and significant time-savings for the Bratjen team. “It’s so much easier,” says Michael. “On the expense side: you just make a charge and take a picture of your receipt. It’s a huge time saver across the board.” 

With Ramp’s ease of use and automatic coding, expense reconciliation now takes 1-2 days -- an improvement over the 2 weeks it previously took. It’s easier for the finance team to find needed invoices and documents within the Ramp platform. “We can just search for the specific vendor, phase code, or person, and find what we need almost immediately,” says Michael. 

Those time-savings have expedited the month-end close process. “We used to be a couple months behind, but now we’re just a month behind,” says Michael. That makes it easier to understand the company’s finances in real-time and make changes or improvements as needed. 

In addition to expediting expense management, Ramp has simplified Bratjen’s bill pay. “As soon as we get an invoice now, we can drag it over into Bill Pay and populate all the vendor information,” says Michael. Before partnering with Ramp, Bratjen’s office manager had to write roughly 100 checks per month, and she would manually write the job number in the check memo. “The person who was reconciling the bank statement at the end of the month would have to look at all the checks and match them,” says Michael. “Now, it’s all on a CSV file we can funnel into our accounting platform.” 

The benefit of that improved process is not just better accuracy in less time -- it’s also a quality of life improvement for the office manager. Michael has witnessed similar improvements across departments. “If our operations manager were on this call, she would tell you there used to be times when she would be tearful, because she was so overwhelmed with how much she was processing,” he says. “I’m thankful we’re now able to get her out of that and into something she’s more passionate about.” 

Similarly, Bratjen’s CEO now has the bandwidth to refocus on his own passion: construction and training. “He’s got such a vast amount of knowledge, but his focus has been trying to put out fires while being heavily involved in accounting,” says Michael. “If he can get out of accounting, he’ll have so much of his life back -- and we’re making steps.” 

When asked what Michael would tell another accountant or operations officer in a construction company about Ramp, he channels Nike. “Do it,” he says. “Just do it.”