How Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco turned 130 years of stewardship into a national model
“We used to pay up to $20k a year for our AP platform. With Ramp, we’re earning back well over that amount. That's money that belongs to the mission now, not to the back-office software.”
Chief Financial Officer, Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco
San Francisco changes the way it always has: suddenly, then all at once. The city rehearses reinvention in public. Gold Rush boomtown, counterculture capital, the place that convinced the world to put a computer in its pocket and, lately, to trust one with its thinking. This city doesn't just face the future. It manufactures it.
But San Francisco has always held two stories at once. There is the one the world watches, and there is the one that has been here all along — in the Tenderloin, the Mission, Bayview, neighborhoods that carry the city's character across generations. This is where families plant themselves and stay, where the skyline changes but the community endures. It is also where Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco has done its work.
The Club has been here since 1891, older than most of what hasn't burned down or been torn up and rebuilt. A founding presence in what became Boys & Girls Clubs of America, it has spent 130 years doing what is, in a city like this one, genuinely hard: staying. Incubating programs the national network later adopted. Earning national awards for excellence. Keeping the lights on after school and during the summer in the places that need them most.
What holds all of it together is the quiet machinery of how money moves through the organization. Fifteen thousand kids, 14 locations, a summer camp in the Mendocino redwoods. For most of the Club's history, that machinery had barely changed. Then a cold call came in.
The "receipt police" and what it cost everyone
The people who run this organization have been here long enough that their jobs feel like purpose. Carlton Eichelberger, raised in the same San Francisco neighborhoods the Club serves, has held many roles over 28 years and now serves as VP of Club Services. Maxine Wilson climbed the ranks over more than 24 years to become COO. Heidi Coffer's connection to the Club goes back further still: she first encountered BGCSF as a CPA at a regional firm, when it appeared on her desk as one of her earliest audits. She later left public accounting to work with nonprofits, took the Club on as a client, and never really left. Her own kids became leaders in training there. More than 20 years later, she is the CFO. At BGCSF, long tenure isn't the exception. It's the signature. When the mission is this clear and this necessary, people tend to stay. They become the heart of the institution.
For people who stay this long, money isn't abstract. But nonprofit finance has a specific kind of gravity. Every dollar carries more than a fiduciary obligation — it reflects a level of financial stewardship that is woven into the fabric of the mission. "Close enough" isn't close enough, because trust is the currency.
BGCSF’s spend happens where the work happens: in Clubhouses, at schools, on the road, at vendor counters. But before Ramp, expense reports piled up at the end of the month, receipts wandered, and approvals were spread across systems.
For Heidi, that meant trying to confirm intent after the fact. The purchase had already been made, and the receipt and context were already stale.
"Month-end turned us into the receipt police. Finance shouldn’t be pulling program staff away from their work to confirm the proper coding of a transaction weeks after it’s made. You can't run a nonprofit on guesswork." — Heidi Coffer, CFO
The cultural cost for staff was even more challenging. Finance became enforcement, and enforcement is a strange role in a place built on community. Too many conversations with cost center leaders became about missing paperwork instead of budgets, priorities, and efficiencies.
And the drag didn't stay in finance. Managers spent time on approvals that should have been instant.
The irony is that the Club is built for urgency. When a door breaks, Carlton fixes it. When a van is down, someone finds a way. But month-end paperwork doesn’t announce itself as urgent until it’s already late.
And because it’s often considered “just finance,” it has a way of quietly making it easy to overlook its impact on advancing the mission.
"I have to give all the credit to Heidi. We normally don't take cold calls," Maxine says. "But we were already doing everything manually — so what did we have to lose?"
From enforcement to automation
The shift wasn't adopting a new tool. It was compressing the distance between a purchase and its record.
With Ramp, BGCSF brought spend control closer to the moment of spend, when the context is still fresh, and the receipt is still in hand. Documentation shows up early. Approvals happen in a steady cadence instead of spiking at month-end. And for the people buying what kids and Clubhouses need, the spend management work stops feeling like a second job.
The deeper change was cultural. When controls live inside the workflow, finance doesn’t have to play cop. It can focus on accelerating what good stewardship actually is: context, judgment, sustainability.
"We went from me saying you are so behind on your receipts to actually having real-time, more strategic conversations about budget management." — Heidi Coffer, CFO
Carlton's work is the kind you can see. BGCSF's facilities aren't just where the mission happens — they're how it shows up. For kids whose neighborhoods are often the last to get attention, a door that closes right, lights that work, equipment that isn't broken: these aren't amenities. They're evidence that someone cares. Repairs typically turn around in 48 hours or less, not because of a policy, but because the standard is that high.
"We don't do expense reports now. They just happen. I can take a picture of a receipt in the parking lot and move on. That's a small thing until you're focused on keeping a bunch of Clubhouses safe and running. You don't want paperwork to be what pulls you away from the work." — Carlton Eichelberger, VP of Club Services
"What do you have to lose?"
The pitch was simple enough to be worth ten minutes: what if spend controls could be easier on staff and tighter where it counts?
BGCSF took the meeting, then took the bet. Heidi had survived enough implementations to know this one was different: "Having been down the trail of multiple software implementations in my long career, this one was nothing — just days, and it was easy.”
Cards were active before they'd signed, and the first bill was paid two days after. The system met the organization where it was. That openness to trying what's next is part of what makes the San Francisco Club a national model.
Boys & Girls Clubs of America is now introducing Ramp to local clubs nationwide — building on operational efficiencies that have returned more than 18,000 hours of administrative time across the 80+ clubs already using the platform.
San Francisco was among the first. The question Maxine asked — what do you have to lose? — turns out to be one that a lot of Club leaders are now answering the same way.
AI that learns like a tenured teammate
Most software shows up with a blank stare: new chart of accounts, new rules, new dropdowns, and a fresh round of “How do we do this here?” Ramp starts differently. It pays attention.
Heidi walked Ramp through how BGCSF works the way you onboard a great hire: here are our cost centers, our 15 locations, and the grant rules we are deeply accountable to getting right. Ramp did what a great colleague does over time: learned the patterns, handled the routine in the background, and surfaced only the exceptions that deserved Heidi's judgment. Now she doesn't have to think about the instructions she gave. She checks which receipts still need attention; Ramp has already handled the rest. “It just knows,” Heidi explains.
A couple of years in, what BGCSF has built goes deeper than most organizations three times their size. Two AI agents power the engine:
- Accounting intelligence has mapped how BGCSF codes spend across 15 sites, grant programs, and budgets
- Approval intelligence routes approvals to the right person before anyone has to ask.
Together, they handle nearly every incoming invoice — reading it, matching it to the right cost center and fund, and queuing it for payment.
893 vendors move through Ramp's payment network: 43 are connected directly for streamlined remittance, and 42 active recurring memo rules handle the Club's most common vendor transactions without a human touch.
That depth didn't happen by accident. Budget controls went live the same moment as the first card — each cost center leader given a monthly limit before anyone swiped. As the system learns, it compounds. For a nonprofit, speed only matters if it comes with accuracy and auditability. Here, it comes with both.
Month-end, without the cliff
Hundreds of vendor bills each month, card purchases arriving from 15 sites in real time. For most nonprofits at this scale, that complexity would require a much larger team.
What changed isn't the volume. It's when the work happens. NetSuite OneWorld syncs continuously, not at month-end — and by the time the last day of the month arrives, most of the accounting already has.
The result is a team that operates more like a control tower than a recovery crew — applying judgment where it's actually needed: budget conversations, strategic tradeoffs, decisions that move the mission forward.
Finance that works like a fundraiser
The numbers don't announce themselves. They accumulate. $293K+ worth of savings since getting started with Ramp. Hundreds of hours saved across the business — an average 25 hours every month just for the finance team. Now, more than 51% of transactions coded without a human in the loop: that last figure representing not just efficiency but something closer to institutional intelligence, a system that has learned how BGCSF works and acts accordingly.
Underneath all of it, 129 workflows running more than 9,500 times a month, the kind of deep tailoring that looks less like a nonprofit using software and more like a nonprofit building infrastructure.
There's also the inversion Heidi didn't see coming. BGCSF used to pay a vendor $15–20K a year. Ramp turned that line item around. The organization now earns more than $30K a year in cashback through their credit cards — more than it ever paid for the platform it replaced.
The win you can't chart (but everyone can feel)
What the system gave back to Heidi wasn't just hours. It was the kind of attention you can only offer when the routine is handled, the mental space to think about what the numbers mean rather than where they went. She's out of the grind. The system surfaces what needs a human eye; the rest resolves itself.
Carlton has a different measure. His moment of joy, he says, is more time for the kids. No more last-minute paperwork, follow-up questions, or distractions that break the flow of the day. When the system becomes this seamless, staff stay where they matter most: on the gym floor, in the homework room, at the art table, fully present with the young people who came here for exactly that. That's the signal the Clubs are running the way they're supposed to. Not a number on a dashboard. Just people, doing the work for the kids, without paperwork pulling them away from it.
