How JDC Power Systems eliminated expense reports and simplified travel with Ramp

Historically, JDC used multiple credit cards for all expenses, including T&E. “We were using the founder’s AmEx card,” says CFO Rocco D’Andraia. “We had multiple cards with him as the personal guarantor.” That system was neither efficient nor controlled—and Rocco and his team were seeking gains in both areas. “We had multiple accounts, and everyone would send mail envelopes with paper copies to our corporate office, where we’d match them up with paper statements one-by-one,” says Rocco. That frustrating, error-prone back-end process took days each month.

Travel was one area where expense management was inefficient and time-intensive, and the finance team had difficulty gaining visibility over spend. With 41 field service technicians traveling frequently, it’s critical for JDC to have a travel expense platform that’s easy-to-use and seamless. 

JDC appreciated that its legacy travel system centralized all travel-related expenses, but it was difficult to ensure policy compliance. “Sometimes it was difficult to get the policy to align with availability in a region,” says Tim Driscoll, EVP of Field Service. The legacy system was also highly manual, which made the process cumbersome for field agents and the finance team alike. “We had to take manual snapshots and create manual tickets and do manual everything,” says Tim. “Users were looking for change.”

JDC partnered with Ramp to consolidate its multiple banking accounts into one centralized expense management platform. The team can now embed expense policies, including travel-related rules, directly into Ramp, which makes it easier for field agents to comply with corporate policy. Ramp’s automated coding, user friendliness, and elimination of paper receipts has effectively ended the need for expense reports at JDC.

“Onboarding with Ramp was very straightforward and easy,” says Rocco. “Now we’re putting together our employee handbook and ensuring our travel policy mirrors the settings we’ve put into Ramp.” Before deploying Ramp, JDC didn’t have an employee handbook. The addition of Ramp’s automated central platform has made the company’s policies easier to codify.

Since implementing Ramp, JDC has saved material time reconciling expense reports each month. “Now we do a quick review, then once the month is closed we can download our expenses directly from Ramp and upload them right into QuickBooks,” says Rocco. “It’s very simple. No more manual entries, no more waiting for people to mail us their receipts or matching up receipts.” Eliminating those manual tasks has recouped 1-2 days each month for the finance team. 

On the employee side, Ramp has added similar efficiencies. “It’s ended the monthly expense report,” says Tim. “Capture and spend is done immediately and done pretty accurately.” That’s a significant shift from JDC’s before-state, which involved manual expense logging, expense report submission, and, often, chasing from the finance team. Ramp has made expense management easy—particularly when it comes to booking travel. 

“Everything is in one spot,” says Rocco. “You can look and compare your flights or hotels all on one page. You don’t have to bounce around to different websites or different airlines or different hotels.” 

Rocco and his team can now also be confident that employees are booking travel in a compliant way. “Travel will be easier to manage as we add more people and have the policies in place,” he says. “Ramp makes it easier to enforce a policy. It’s hard to manage various policies without a platform in place.” With Ramp, Rocco and his team can set a policy that aligns with the employee handbook, and the platform enforces the policy automatically. “Now we can manage by exception rather than have to review every single person traveling,” says Rocco. 

In addition to eliminating nuisances for employees and adding peace of mind to the confidence team, Ramp’s built-in travel policies position the company well for scale. All in all, Ramp has been a net positive for JDC—and Rocco would recommend Ramp to a friend or colleague 10 times out of 10. “Ramp has helped us improve our efficiency on the back-end and our compliance on the front-end,” says Rocco. On both ends, implementing Ramp has been a win for JDC.