City of Mount Vernon addresses budget constraints by blocking non-compliant spend, earning cash back with Ramp
"Ramp had everything we were looking for, and even things we weren't looking for. The policy aspects, that's something I never even dreamed of that a purchasing card program could handle."
Director of Finance, City of Mount Vernon
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For the City of Mount Vernon, Washington, every dollar and hour counts. With inflation driving up costs and tax-based revenue tightly capped, the city’s finance team is constantly looking for opportunities to save.
“We’re always trying to use the revenues that we do have in the most efficient manner,” Mount Vernon Finance Director Doug Volesky says.
That focus on efficiency led the city to look for a better way to manage spend for its 300-plus employee operation across departments including Police, Fire, Public Works, Parks, and Library.
Receipts for different municipal departments scattered across systems
Only 5% of the expense budget for Mount Vernon, home to about 36,000 residents, is discretionary and the city keeps a lean finance department of nine people. Those resource constraints magnified the pain of the inefficiencies with the city’s legacy purchasing card (P-card) program.
Expenses were a constant challenge for the city’s team. Employees had to scan receipts, manually upload the files to shared drives, categorize and code transactions based on their best guess of what budget line item they should fall under. For a workforce that was often in the field working on community engagement, the additional burden of filing receipts was untenable.
Reviews were no better: A departmental leader would review all expenses and follow up on any missing receipts, codes, or other details. That approach was also imperfect; often it fell on accounting to track down the missing information, and field teams could be hard to reach since they weren’t always parked at a desk.
“There was no concise audit trail. There was no easy way to see, ‘Hey, did the supervisor sign off on this one?’ or ‘Where are we at in the approval process?’ Nor did we have the ability to proactively catch inappropriate spending,’” finance manager Chase Kinney says. “It was all very manual and very time-consuming.”
This made audits and month-end reconciliation more painful than necessary. These outdated workflows not only ate up staff time but made it difficult to spot savings opportunities and monitor expense trends.
Lifting the burden of expense reports for numerous departments
After learning about Ramp and then seeing the solution in action, Volesky immediately recognized the potential for Ramp to save the city time and money through automation and stronger expense compliance.
“Ramp kind of had everything that we were looking for and things we weren't even looking for,” he says. “The policy aspects of all that, that's something never even dreamt that a purchasing card program could handle.”
After an implementation that Volesky described as “extremely easy,” Mount Vernon saw instant improvements.The system’s user-friendliness drove immediate buy-in and adoption that exceeded the finance team’s expectations.
City employees in the field could snap and upload photos of receipts from their phones so finance didn’t have to waste time finding them later. Receipts are automatically matched to the right transaction, avoiding much of the back-and-forth between finance and other city departments. Those expenses are automatically routed to the appropriate manager based on rules defined by accounting, with clear audit trails showing when charges were made and approved.
“I think it also gives a cardholder a lot more control of what they're doing, and it's not so much accounting’s responsibility now to make sure everything's in there,” Volesky says.
Finance can easily adjust credit limits or control which type of expenses the system flags or blocks by department, helping Mount Vernon enforce its nuanced purchasing policies. For example, the city allows cigarette purchases only for field-based social workers who need to build trust with individuals who need their help.
A blueprint for public sector efficiency
What once took the finance staff hours now takes minutes. And that translates to real savings.
At month end, accounting specialist Hera Hu simply runs a report and imports it into Mount Vernon’s ERP system, OpenGov, through Ramp’s universal CSV upload. Expenses already have the correct GL codes that match what the ERP system uses.
“Every month we would have to spend at least three, four hours to just find those codes, those receipts, and reconcile each transaction,” Hu says. “Now it takes me about 15 minutes.”
Those time savings extend across other departments. Mount Vernon employees have shared that it's much faster and easier to file expenses. Preset card controls have blocked thousands of dollars worth of non-compliant spend, and Volesky receives notifications about potential out-of-policy expenses to follow up on.
Remarkably, Ramp has effectively cost the city nothing—thanks to cash back that exceeds their annual software subscription cost.
With spend across the city unified on Ramp, the finance team is exploring other features it can leverage in the system. For example, the fire department now files reimbursements in Ramp, a much simpler process that puts more spend in one place. The city is using the comments feature to flag repeat mistakes to department heads and prevent headaches later. The system records each comment in the audit trail for that transaction, letting the finance team see in real time which departments or employees would benefit from additional training.
“We're just scratching the surface as far as how to really use Ramp effectively,” Kinney says. “I'm hopeful we can leverage the system to get everybody on the same page as far as how employees should file and code expenses to minimize errors and really reduce the time we spend on monthly reviews.”
For other cash-strapped government agencies trying to make the most of every taxpayer dollar, Volesky has simple advice: “I would say get together with Ramp and talk to them. It's very easy to implement, you see the rewards right away with the ease of use getting receipts uploaded and reconciled, and then just the little-to-no cost itself when you factor in the rebates. It's just a win-win all the way around.”
