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How Mindbody & Classpass saved time, enhanced visibility, and improved usability with Ramp
“The biggest thing was the user experience,” says Heather Bruzus, Principal Accountant at Mindbody. “It was a very painful process. We had to integrate with an external credit card system, which caused a lot of issues with data assignment and data flow, which caused a lot more IT and administrative work.” The team did not have visibility into real-time spend, which was difficult from both a strategic and an efficiency perspective. “Spend was just a black box, essentially,” says Heather. “We wouldn’t know what was out there until we pulled the accrual report, which we didn’t have the flexibility to easily filter and see within our system.” The result was a lengthy accrual process, which extended Mindbody’s time to get their data into the ERP.
Mindbody’s various disjointed systems also created difficulties that frustrated employees trying to make approved purchases. “We were hitting a lot of roadblocks with team members trying to charge cards and it not working,” says Heather. “We would have to run a report out of our banking system to figure out what was happening, and often we would have to call the bank to get to the bottom of the problem. It would then take a day or two to resolve the issue. Conducting that research would take a full day, and the implementation would take 1-2 days — and all the while, the employee is blocked from spending.”
All of these issues made for a cumbersome, inefficient system, which was only exacerbated when Mindbody merged with ClassPass in 2021.
“When we merged with ClassPass, we took a step back to see if there was a better option,” says Heather. When the company decided to part ways with its legacy credit card provider, it decided to concurrently search for a new expense management system. “We decided to look at a more holistic solution instead of one that was segmented between credit cards and expense management,” Heather explains.
Mindbody partnered with Ramp to usher in a single, streamlined corporate card and expense management program for both sides of the business. Ramp’s integration with Netsuite means that much of the accounting team’s previously manual work now happens automatically. The ability to create custom fields and coding rules has reduced hours wasted on back and forth between the accounting team and employees, as well as improved the accuracy of the data inputs.
“We created a custom field in Ramp that maps all of our department names to internal IDs, which has been super helpful,” says Heather. “It’s now in the system, and it’s something we can use without having to think about it much. Having the flexibility to add new fields, create rules, map them, and use them in reports has been a huge time-saver.” Thanks to Ramp, the sync process for approved transactions is just the click of a button.
As Mindbody continues to scale, Ramp’s easy approval process has been instrumental. Previously, the process of requesting a corporate card for a new employee was a lengthy one that involved finance, IT, and admin. “They now get a virtual card immediately,” says Heather. “It’s allowed employees to move forward with their plans immediately. That’s helped us scale and empower more people.”
Mindbody partnered with Ramp to usher in a single, streamlined corporate card and expense management program for both sides of the business. Ramp’s integration with Netsuite means that much of the accounting team’s previously manual work now happens automatically. The ability to create custom fields and coding rules has reduced hours wasted on back and forth between the accounting team and employees, as well as improved the accuracy of the data inputs.
“We created a custom field in Ramp that maps all of our department names to internal IDs, which has been super helpful,” says Heather. “It’s now in the system, and it’s something we can use without having to think about it much. Having the flexibility to add new fields, create rules, map them, and use them in reports has been a huge time-saver.” Thanks to Ramp, the sync process for approved transactions is just the click of a button.
As Mindbody continues to scale, Ramp’s easy approval process has been instrumental. Previously, the process of requesting a corporate card for a new employee was a lengthy one that involved finance, IT, and admin. “They now get a virtual card immediately,” says Heather. “It’s allowed employees to move forward with their plans immediately. That’s helped us scale and empower more people.”
Since partnering with Ramp, Mindbody has removed the “black box” that once characterized expense management. “We definitely have more reporting and more visibility than we had before,” says Heather. “Most things sync over to NetSuite automatically, which is great for real-time visibility and accuracy.” In addition to automatic syncing, the flexible reporting Ramp offers helps drive company-wide visibility. “Our director of accounting can easily go in [to Ramp] and see what the team is and isn’t approving and why things are taking more or less time,” says Heather. An added benefit? “They don’t have to ask us for reports. They now have the visibility and ability to do anything themselves.”
That autonomy contributes to one of the greatest benefits Heather and her team have noticed since deploying Ramp: an improved user experience. “Whenever we implement a new system, it has to be something the team can actually use,” explains Heather. “It’s a lot harder to make people comfortable or use the system when it’s really blocky.”
For Mindbody, Ramp has proved to be one such usable system. “Submitting reimbursement requests used to require a lot of admin work that we had to push to the employee, and that caused tension with accounting,” says Heather. “Now, it feels like we’re on the same team. We got a ton of positive feedback when we went live with Ramp. The Director of Sales reached out, and we’ve had salespeople reaching out to ask for more data. I don’t think that’s ever happened in my 12 years here.”
To Heather, the ease of use Ramp offers has been a pleasant surprise. “I actually created all kinds of user documents for the team,” says Heather. “We were going to hold office hours, but it was so quiet that we never needed to. All the feedback was positive — it was very easy to roll out.” In Heather’s view, a lack of questions indicates a job well done. “But what took Ramp to a step above is that we got positive feedback, which just doesn’t happen very often,” she says. “I think that has proved that this was the right decision. We’re moving in the right direction. We know the front-end of accounting is a well-oiled machine, and now we can focus on the accounting side and make that more efficient.”
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