How Mix Talent cut costs, gained transparency, and improved efficiency with Ramp

Mix Talent’s legacy corporate credit card system was no system at all—and that proved challenging. 

“We weren’t earning any money or rebates from credit card transactions,” explains Mix Talent Accounting & Finance Lead, Paul Streitenberger. “It was all being done at the partner level, so partners were having to put expenses on their cards.” 

Not only was Mix Talent not earning points on transactions, it was also spending material dollars on the expense management solutions it did have, including Bill.com and Expensify. “Our licensing fees were continuing to increase year after year, and they always seemed to be tiered based on transactions,” says Paul. “As we grew, we got into larger tiers of costs.” 

This was particularly problematic as Mix Talent planned to enter a growth phase and hire a few hundred additional employees. The company didn’t have the infrastructure to issue cards easily and efficiently to these team members, nor was it maximizing its cost-saving potential.  

The lack of a consolidated system made onboarding challenging, expense management daunting, and month close time-consuming. With so many fragmented systems and no formal card program, the team did not have a standard month close process. As a result, closing the books took 10-plus days each month.

Paul and the Mix Talent team needed a new system that could offer consolidation and cost-saving potential.

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Mix Talent partnered with Ramp to deploy a formal corporate card program, which integrated easily with the company’s tech stack and enabled consolidation across the entire spend management process.

“Having a one-stop shop for all those expense needs has really simplified my job,” says Paul. Ramp allowed Mix Talent to reduce the burden on a handful of partners, who were making purchases on their personal cards, and instituted the infrastructure that makes it easy for the finance team to issue cards quickly and securely to as many employees as needed. “It’s made things a lot easier on our end users: the recruiters and sales folks who are out there on the road,” Paul says.

With a single consolidated system, Paul no longer needs to chase employees for their receipts. “I’m not having to spend a lot of time in compliance tracking down receipts,” he says. This single central system also makes on and off-boarding much easier. 

“We’re fully remote, so it’s easy to just push information to new employees,” says Paul. That adds up to significant time-savings—especially during a growth phase, when the team is onboarding hundreds of new employees in a calendar year.

Instituting Ramp has added much-needed structure to various expense management and accounting processes. “We’re a very recurring business—we have the same kinds of licenses each month,” explains Paul. “Ramp allows us to set up those recurring transactions easily. We put rules in place through Ramp, so the coding is done for us.” As a result, coding has become more consistent—which has also resulted in a faster, more efficient month-close process.

Whereas the team previously did not follow a particular month-close process, Ramp has enabled the development of a structured framework. “Ramp controls, especially flagging for information we need and scheduling information we need, puts the infrastructure in place to allow us to standardize the process, which we weren’t able to do before,” says Paul. “During close, I’m not worried about things getting recorded in error. I can spend more time on analytics as opposed to transactional things.”

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Consolidating the spend management process has enabled Mix Talent to implement structure and systems that have had material benefit for the business. “Previously, we didn’t really know how much we were spending per vendor, because our spend wasn’t on a centralized system,” says Paul. “Now, I use Ramp’s functionality to examine the contracts and understand whether we’re getting the best terms, as opposed to just trying to get the bill paid.” 

Without a central system like Ramp, Mix Talent didn’t have visibility over who was spending what on which vendors—and that meant duplicate spend. “We’ve saved over $10K in Zoom consolidation alone,” notes Paul. 

Mix Talent’s previous reliance on partners to put corporate spend on their personal cards resulted in tedious manual reimbursement work for the finance team, but it also led to a lack of transparency that made forecasting difficult. “We had no visibility into our cash flow needs,” says Paul. “Ramp has allowed us to project cash flow so much better.”

Reducing manual work with Ramp’s AI-driven platform has allowed the company to eliminate half an FTE from the Accounts Payable department. “The handling of receipts, the handling of the onboard has really cut half a position out of our processing and allowed me to work on other things that are much more value-additive,” says Paul. “I can spend literally 15 minutes a day and handle accounts payable.” 

Those time-savings extend to the month-close process, which Ramp has significantly expedited. Closing the books at the end of the month previously took more than 10 days—it now takes six. 

Since partnering with Ramp, Mix Talent has instituted new systems and policies that make daily work easier for the finance team and end users alike, and empowered finance team members to turn their attention to higher-value tasks. That’s an important combination at any point in a company’s life—but especially during periods of growth.

“It’s easily paying for itself,” says Paul.

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