How Piñata halved its finance team’s workload after moving from Brex to Ramp
"Switching from Brex to Ramp wasn’t just a platform swap—it was a strategic upgrade that aligned with our mission to be agile, efficient, and financially savvy."
CEO, Piñata
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Brex brings manual receipt matching and mobile app mishaps
For a fast-moving startup like Piñata, the nation’s premier reward and credit building program for renters, every hour and every dollar counts. As the property technology business built out its team, Brex struggled to address emerging challenges around expense management. The company wasn’t just looking for a better corporate card—it needed a solution that could help them tighten cost controls and increase spend transparency.
As Piñata’s distributed team expanded, expense processing and limited spend controls caused it to lose more time and money.
With Brex, despite the automations it advertises, the finance team spent hours every week manually matching employee-submitted receipts to the corresponding expenses. Nearly 40% of transactions had missing receipts because submitting them was not easy or intuitive. Brex could not automatically match receipts in employees’ inboxes to expenses nor auto-lock cards if employees didn’t submit them in a timely manner. It was a big enough problem to delay Piñata’s monthly close.
“We’re a company built to reward renters and get them credit they deserve for their largest monthly expense,” Piñata CEO Lily Liu says. “We needed a corporate card that kept our pace, saving us the two things every 0-to-1 startup needs: More time and money.”
Finance couldn’t adjust limits or make other changes through Brex’s mobile app, which was especially problematic when trying to assist teams quickly on the road. Adjusting card limits or issuing new cards often required logging in on a desktop or even contacting support, a frustrating roadblock for a remote-first, fast-moving startup.
“What we need to be able to do is spin up cards easily and correctly,” Liu said. “And then we need team members to understand basically how to manage their own accounts without doing any kind of live training. There's no time for that in an early-stage company.”
On top of that, Brex’s complicated points redemption options stirred confusion rather than value.
Piñata sought a flexible expense management system that could easily be tailored to the needs of different teams and individuals. It needed software that would give time back to a stretched finance team and that employees could pick up quickly.
Automation and granular controls fuel efficiency as company size doubles
Piñata’s leaders immediately recognized that Ramp aligned with its pace and purpose—it was built for entrepreneurs who want to build, not budget.
The company replaced Brex with Ramp’s corporate card and expense management system, and the new platform’s automations brought an immediate impact.
Piñata found that several Ramp features eased receipt collection compared to Brex. Ramp lets the admin set up the system to automatically pull receipts from Gmail so that all employees can take advantage of this capability right out of the box. Brex, on the other hand, requires each user to individually install the Gmail add-on to get similar functionality. Furthermore, Ramp’s built-in merchant integrations, including Amazon Business, Uber, and Lyft, mean Piñata’s employees never have to upload receipts for transactions with those merchants. Because Piñata’s staff no longer had to chase receipts manually, the company reported saving both time and administrative cost during each monthly close.
“If one of our team members is automatically getting that receipt in their inbox, Ramp has done a good job actually attaching that to the expense,” Liu notes. “I think that level of smart automation, these little things, allow our team members and our finance team to not have to think about tracking every single one of those elements. It just saves time.”
Cards with budgets and granular, preset controls on where employees can spend satisfy Piñata’s need for tighter controls. Teams frequently on the road can easily submit expenses, and the finance team can now approve expenses, adjust limits, and even issue new cards from the Ramp mobile app.
The new platform also brought a valuable feature that Brex lacked: Savings Insights within Ramp Intelligence, which helps companies spot major spikes in spend and duplicate subscriptions.
The move from Brex to Ramp took only a few weeks. From day one, Pinata empowered managers to approve expenses on the go and immediately began using the card auto-lock feature in Ramp Plus. This nudges employees to submit receipts from previous expenses in a timely manner by locking their cards if they don’t send in receipts by a certain date.
“Ramp gave our team back time, clarity, and control,” Liu says. “Switching from Brex to Ramp wasn’t just a platform swap—it was a strategic upgrade that aligned with our mission to be agile, efficient, and financially savvy.”
95% receipt compliance saves finance 5 hours every week
Ramp’s policy-driven controls and automations translate to far less manual, transactional work for the finance team. Its simple, user-friendly UI means this group can quickly and easily set rules that prevent future headaches. These capabilities helped the finance team halve the time it spends shoring up expenses from 10 hours per week to five.
That’s freed up more time for finance to act as strategic operators instead of expense chasers. The group is using the extra time to build out Piñata’s B2B expansion strategy, proactively identify cost optimization opportunities, and develop budgeting frameworks for different departments.
Auto-locking cards and automated receipt matching mean 95% of expenses that require receipts now include them, a nearly 60% improvement compared to Brex. That helps prevent extra work later—Piñata has shaved three days off its monthly close.
“I think the biggest thing for us is really having that more discrete control on individual team members’ spend, and then the ability to easily maneuver around it in the field,” Liu says.
Ramp’s Savings Insights uncovered multiple instances of separate employee licenses for the same tools. This saved the startup a few thousands dollars per year.
“Not only was that something that was automatically flagged for us, but then we were able to rectify it,” Liu said. “Those teams were able to consolidate the accounts, recover that overpayment that we made.”
Finally, Ramp brought much simpler rewards: cash back on every purchase that Pinata could pump straight back into its growth engine.
“You don’t get into the complexities of having to compare points-to-value—like, should we use it on flight credits or hotels—which is what we used to do with Brex,” Liu says. “Now it's just straightforward: here’s the cash back, here’s the credit you’ve earned based on your spend volume.”
Internally, Ramp has shifted how employees view software that was once an afterthought and source of obstacles.
“We hear from our employees, ‘Ramp is moving fast. They have all these new features coming out,’ and honestly, it's nice to see that level of excitement around our corporate card,” Liu says. “It's not something I've experienced — and I've been in startups for quite some time.”
“The switch wasn’t a cost—it was a catalyst,” Piñata President Dimitri Falk said. “Because when your tools work for you, your team gets to do what they do best: build.”
