How Notion unified global spend management across 10+ countries
"Ramp is the only vendor that can service all of our employees across the globe in one unified system. They handle multiple currencies seamlessly, integrate with all of our accounting systems, and thanks to their customizable card and policy controls, we're compliant worldwide.”
Chief Accounting Officer, Notion
See insights on how 45,000+ customers spent on Ramp in 2025
Notion has transformed how over 100 million people work. Less than a decade after releasing Notion 1.0, the company has become one of the most beloved productivity platforms in the world.
Notion is more than a tool for notes and project management. It's the AI-powered workspace of choice for consumers worldwide, hypergrowth startups like Cursor and Vercel, and leading enterprises like OpenAI, Nvidia, and Figma. The company has seen exponential international growth and built a global footprint with 10+ offices from Dublin to Tokyo. Notion has localized its product in 25+ languages and cultivated a global community of avid fans, with 80% of its users living outside the U.S.
Today, Notion has become a global powerhouse. The challenge? Finding the right partner that could scale with them as they continue rapid international expansion.
The financial complexity of global growth
With employees based all over the world, from Seoul to Sydney to Munich, Notion's finance team faced a complex reality that many rapidly scaling companies know all too well. The team was using multiple vendors to support numerous regions, and spending countless hours manually reconciling expenses, calculating conversions across global currencies, and addressing out-of-policy transactions. Even senior leaders like Zell were stuck chasing receipts.
"Our previous vendor wasn't able to service our entire employee base," Chief Accounting Officer Brandon Zell recalls. "We had fragmented systems, which created inconsistent processes and limited visibility into our global spend. Our RFP was all about finding the right vendor that could not only service all of our employees across the globe but also make it feel seamless.”
The stakes were high. Disjointed expense management wasn't just an administrative headache. It was creating compliance risks and audit nightmares, and preventing the finance team from focusing more of its time on strategic initiatives.
Consolidated global spend visibility and control
After an extensive evaluation process, Notion moved all expenses for its global workforce from a patchwork of vendors, including Navan and Expensify, to Ramp.
"Ramp is the only vendor that can service all of our employees across the globe in one unified system," says Zell. "They handle multiple currencies seamlessly, integrate with all of our accounting systems, and thanks to their customizable card and policy controls, we're compliant worldwide.”
After an implementation that Zell described as "seamless" and "refreshingly collaborative,” Notion saw fast results.
- Global coverage: A single platform serving 1,000+ employees in 10+ countries.
- Global compliance: 94% of transactions are now in policy with the ability to create automated, entity-specific policy enforcement.
- Spend control: More than $1M saved annually from granular card controls automatically blocking out-of-policy transactions.
- Higher receipt compliance: 95% of transactions now include receipts (up from 80% pre-Ramp).
- Accurate coding: 88% of transactions are auto-coded, reducing manual work.
- Time savings: 75 hours saved per month across the finance team (equivalent to reclaiming nearly two full workweeks of productivity every month).
Now Notion can instantly connect every dollar spent to a business outcome. With Ramp handling the operational complexity, Notion's finance team now spends its time on what matters: identifying growth opportunities and optimizing investments that fuel global expansion.
One unified, global experience
Notion sought a solution for its financial operations that mirrored its own product: an all-in-one, fully customizable, and intuitive platform that could support international teams with vastly different local regulatory requirements. Other solutions that Notion’s team evaluated, such as Brex, required them to trade off between a great user experience and comprehensive global compliance.
“Notion’s culture is built around craftsmanship and execution,” Zell says. “We empower people to create the tools they need to do their best work, and select partners who do the same.”
The breakthrough: Ramp's platform allowed Notion to customize compliance requirements by entity while maintaining unified processes.
"Different jurisdictions have different policies. For example, Ireland requires receipts for 100% of transactions," explains Jennifer La, assistant controller. “Since we didn’t want to burden our entire global workforce with one country’s stricter rules, with Ramp we can now enable Ireland-specific requirements just for the local team."
Notion’s finance team had always believed that its expense policies and procedures could be globally standardized once it had software powerful enough to support local customizations. The Ramp implementation team worked with them to turn this into reality.
"We learned that almost all of our processes could be globally aligned," La says. "Only specific compliance requirements needed to remain local. Our processes are dramatically simpler now, both for our finance team and employees worldwide."
Employee experience: from skepticism to advocacy
Company-wide platform changes can be notoriously difficult. So how did Notion's global team react to switching platforms?
"Some people hate change, and I am one of those people," admits Shannon McCormick, international workplace experience lead. “At first, I was very hesitant. I didn't want another finance tool.”
Then she tried it.
"As soon as I texted my first Ramp receipt, I realized Ramp is a game-changer. It's incredibly intuitive."
McCormick contrasts Ramp with previous solutions: "What's brilliant about Ramp is that you can't really go wrong. If you make a mistake, you can fix it yourself in seconds. The receipt capture is lightning-fast — you can literally just take a picture through iMessage or Slack. Once people saw how easy expenses were with Ramp, it caught on quickly. Everyone started raving about Ramp across the company.”
“We want our employees to have a fair, ubiquitous experience. We don't want team members that are in our Korea office having a different experience than those in the United States,” La explains. “Everybody's getting the same experience and benefits with Ramp. The global experience has been great.”
Beyond global operational improvements, Notion's leadership saw a deeper connection with Ramp's approach.
“We’re maniacal about using tools that are both functional and beautiful. Notion itself is an all-in-one system you can build and run your entire workspace. We’re allergic to buying tools that we can’t consolidate and scale with,” says Head of Strategic Finance Tzu-San Hung. “There’s no way we’d be using a clunky legacy system like Concur. Beautiful tools use beautiful tools.”
This sentiment is echoed by Notion’s executive team. “Using Ramp feels like using Notion,” Zell says. “It’s flexible, easy to use, and helps us do our work faster.”
