How Ramp helped Quora’s finance team streamline operations, simplify AP, and stay lean

Quora’s lean accounting team was staggering under the weight of an inefficient system defined by clunky processes and aging tools. The company used one system for credit cards and expense reimbursements, another for bill approvals and ingestion, and a third for payments. 

“We were kind of in a split world,” says Quora Finance Manager, Richard Gobea. “Everything worked well for the first year or two, then things just started to age.”

As time went on, accounting processes became more difficult. “We started to feel the pain, especially on the AP side,” says Richard. “We had a weird setup where bills would get emailed into an AP email address, then we’d download them, they would get saved to Google Drive, and then we would link them to the bill in NetSuite.” Employees, however, didn’t have NetSuite access, so they would need to do approvals by email. 

“The emails would constantly get lost,” says Richard. “It was just not a good employee experience, and it created a lot of burden for the AP team.”

What’s more, the tools in the accounting tech stack didn’t integrate easily with NetSuite, which was problematic for the Quora team. “We knew we needed a better solution,” says Richard.

Richard needed a better solution -- but he also needed a user-friendly platform that he could feel comfortable deploying with limited technical support. “Larger solutions felt onerous and difficult to set up and maintain for such a small team,” he says. “I needed to find something that was a good balance of something I could maintain myself while also being flexible and scalable for the company.”

The team appreciated Ramp’s ability to expedite processes and help them think strategically. “I started to go through and look at how transactions flow, how we review things,” says Richard. “The platform wants you to be smart about how you review what you’re looking at. If you spend the time to set up the rules upfront, you can avoid some of that manual work that I was doing previously and really focus on the exceptions and the odd transactions.”

With Ramp, Quora gives all employees at least one virtual card they can use for spend programs, remote-first expenses, and wellness programs. The majority of employees use the virtual cards to spend directly, and the remainder take advantage of Ramp’s user-friendly reimbursement process for incidentals.

Since implementing Ramp, Quora has gained efficiencies that have made the accounting team’s jobs much easier. The formerly cumbersome AP process, for example, has been significantly streamlined. 

“The whole process has gotten easier for the bill processor,” says Richard. “For a recurring vendor, a 5-8 minute process now takes 1-2 minutes in Ramp. It’s literally a couple of clicks.” 

Setting up new vendors, too, is much easier with Ramp. “It had become very time consuming,” Richard notes. “Every time we went to set up a new vendor or a vendor changed their bank information, something would happen and the payments would get rejected.” Richard was spending material time going back and forth with the legacy provider and the vendor to ensure proper setup. Ramp has helped him reclaim that time -- and, as an added benefit, vendors are now paid more quickly and efficiently. 

Ramp hasn’t just improved the efficiency of the AP system, though -- it has also increased the accounting team’s visibility into corporate spend. “We can all see the AP activity,” Richard says. “Before, we’d wait 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, maybe a day to find out where bills were. Now we each get copies of the emails. Everybody knows I’ve forwarded an email to Ramp, Ramp has received it, and Ramp has responded.” 

Quora has also gained efficiency from Ramp’s seamless integration with NetSuite. Richard notes that the two-way sync makes it helpful to see any changes that are being made in real-time. “It also reduces the amount of double-entry that’s happening.” The ease and speed of the integration has been invaluable, notes Richard. “In the old world, there were multiple entry points, and sometimes bills were put into the wrong places. There were 10+ steps to go from PDF processing to Netsuite, to payment and reporting,” he says. “With Ramp and Netsuite together we’ve reduced that to 3 simple steps. It’s more efficient and a huge time saver.”

The efficiencies gained across multiple processes add up. “Our monthly close for cash and credit cards has gone from being probably a two to three-hour exercise to 15-20 minutes,” says Richard.

The time-savings has meant that Richard now has the bandwidth to think about the accounting process more strategically. “I’m approaching the point now where we’ll be able to make improvements versus just trying to keep everything afloat,” he says. 

“For a long time, especially as our legacy system started to degrade, we were spending more and more time on the phone with the prior payment processor trying to make sure vendors were getting paid.” Through automation, Ramp has enabled Richard to catch up -- and look ahead. “Now I actually have the time to think about how to improve things, how to make things more efficient and better for employees,” Richard says. 

Ultimately, Ramp helps Quora run a lean team without adding undue burden to the finance team. “Part of the reason we’ve been able to stay this lean is because of the systems and processes that are in place,” he says. “Using Ramp is a no-brainer.”