How Liquid Measurement Systems reduced fraud, improved UX, and drove efficiency with Ramp

Liquid Management Systems (LMS)’ was making a change in their banking partner, who they had an archaic corporate spend program with, the company knew it needed to find a new corporate spend solution. “We knew it was time to look for a new bank, and with that came the need to look for a new credit card system,” says Sarah Paxman-Bean, Director of Finance & HR at LMS. Driving her decision was the desire to empower employees with efficient, user-friendly tools. “One of the things that became very clear with our legacy provider was they didn’t have the tools to do that,” she says. “Employees couldn’t do anything on their phones, so it took forever for people to upload receipts.”

That created a frustrating experience for general LMS employees and for Sarah’s team. “My accounting specialist would have to help them upload receipts on the computer,” she says. Finding a system that would support phone-based receipt uploads was important to Sarah. “If I can create a convenience for the employees, that means a time savings for us,” she says. 

In addition, Sarah was looking for a new platform that could address some of the issues she’d noticed with LMS’ previous system, including frequent fraudulent charges for the oft-traveling business development team and poor customer service. “Customer service was a huge issue,” notes Sarah. “If there was any kind of issue on a credit card statement, it took forever to get any kind of communication from the company.” 

LMS sought a corporate spend partner that could deliver superior customer service, enhanced security and controls, and an improved user experience.

Sarah considered four potential spend management platforms before partnering with Ramp. “Ramp was the most responsive and most knowledgeable during the demo,” she says. Onboarding, too, was simple and straightforward. “I couldn’t ask for a quicker turnaround,” says Sarah. “It was literally a two-day activation for me, which blew my mind.”

Setting Ramp up was an easy process, thanks in large part to Ramp’s superior UX. “Ramp is easy from the end user’s perspective,” Sarah says. “I can export my general ledger accounts out of one system, put them in the template, upload them, and bam -- I’m set in less than five minutes.” Importing LMS’ policies, codes, accounts, and users into Ramp’s platform was easy -- and once it was done, the company could hit the ground running.

“It’s so nice to be able to hand it off,” Sarah says, speaking of some of the more tedious manual tasks that had characterized her work prior to partnering with Ramp. “Even the accounting policies that I created in Ramp were not at all difficult. I love Ramp’s training academy -- if I was curious about something, I would jump over there. Then I could also ask for instant feedback from Ramp’s AI chatbot. That was phenomenal, and I’m so appreciative of that.”

Ramp has made life easier across the board at LMS -- for Sarah’s team, certainly, and also for the frequent card-users who constantly need to submit expense reports. “The business development folks love it,” says Sarah. “They said, ‘we’re never ever changing the system again.’ They do everything through their phones now, and I don’t think I’ve gotten one negative comment.” Before switching to Ramp, every employee would need to photocopy their receipts and manually upload them. “Ramp has saved one person on our team 4-5 hours per month in running after people and helping them get their receipts in,” says Sarah. “She doesn’t have to do that anymore. People are really driving their own expenses.” 

That autonomy has had the added benefit of making LMS’ already efficient end-of-month close system even tighter. “Because people can do their own receipts so easily and code in real-time, our accountant has minimal work to do at the end of the month,” says Sarah.

From a security standpoint, Ramp has given LMS much more peace of mind. “The majority of users have both a virtual and physical card” she says. “That’s a great thing for security protection -- if the physical card gets compromised, they still have access to the virtual card.”

All these benefits have resulted in significant time-savings, which the LMS team has reallocated to more strategic, higher-value work. “Now that we have Ramp up and running and it’s successful, we don’t have to put a lot of energy into expense management the way we did before,” Sarah says. “We can now work on some of those things we’d had to put to the side because we didn’t have the time.” 

That changed since LMS partnered with Ramp. “Now that things are all running smoothly,” says Sarah, “we can start to refocus on other projects.”