How Shopify controls spend for 10k+ employees with Ramp
“For us, expense reports are dead. Ramp killed expense reports.”
Director, International Controller
See insights on how 50,000+ customers spent on Ramp in 2025
A reimbursement-first culture that created busy work for accountants and frustration for employees
As a modern e-commerce company, superior software and systems are core to Shopify’s culture. When it came to expense management, however, the company was stuck in a lengthy, manual reimbursement process.
Unscalable processes
“We never wanted to be so reimbursement-focused,” says Phil Whitham, Shopify’s International Controller. “That’s just how we started. But as we continued to grow, there was never really a better tool. For us, being in such a hyper-growth stage where we’re scaling constantly, you can’t do everything. Until now, improving employee expenses just never made it to the top of the list.”
Phil and his team knew that needed to change, and particularly as Shopify began meeting more often in person post-COVID. “People were traveling three to four times a year, multiple days at a time. We never did that before, so we didn’t have the process needed to support all of that travel.” explains Phil. This increase in travel prompted a full-scale expense management overhaul.
Delayed reimbursement payments
Shopify’s legacy reimbursement process was cumbersome for the finance team and also required employees to wait several weeks to be reimbursed. The team knew they could create a better experience for their employees with the right solution. “When you’re trying to get money back to people via payroll, which is how we used to do it, it could be 45+ days from the date that the cost was incurred by our employee to the time we were able to get the money back to them,” says Phil. “You’ve missed a whole credit card statement in that time.”
Compounding the problem was a failure of employees to actually complete expense reports.
“Employees shouldn’t be incurring expenses on behalf of the company and then feeling like it’s too onerous for them to be reimbursed for those expenses,” adds Christine Mimnagh-Fleming, Shopify’s Senior Manager of Finance Transformation.
Clunky systems preventing insights and value-added work
The legacy expense management process was too complicated and required reconciling information between three systems. “We had employee reimbursements going through our HRIS, and then we had people throughout the organization who had corporate cards,” says Christine. “Those expenses were then feeding into a credit card reconciliation tool, [before] being manually reconciled by each team.” As a final step, the finance team would review expenses and push them to Shopify’s ERP.
Even after all those steps, the expense management data that the team fed into Shopify’s ERP was too vague. “It didn’t have all of the data attributes we see today with Ramp,” says Christine. The finance team didn’t have enough insight into spend at the team level. “Finance often had to extract additional information from anecdotal evidence or conversations,” says Christine. That created a protracted, inefficient process that didn’t jive with Shopify’s overarching goals for the finance team.
“We’re trying to get away from manual processes,” says Christine. “That’s at the heart of our finance transformation journey at Shopify—making sure we’re reducing toil so we can move our people from working on inward processes to a more outward-facing, value-add business partner role. That’s what finance should be.”
An automated expense management system, powered by corporate cards
Shopify partnered with Ramp to revolutionize its expense management system and empower employees with highly controlled corporate cards.
From manual reimbursements to cards
Ramp enabled Shopify to start issuing corporate cards with automated spend controls and receipt collection. As a result, employees no longer need to spend out of pocket and file manual expense reports, and finance teams needn’t worry about out-of-policy transactions.
With Ramp’s spend programs, the finance team could issue cards at scale for benefits like gym stipends, healthy living stipends, and internet reimbursements. “We’ve packaged all of our perks and benefits and brought them into spend programs,” explains Phil. “They live in Ramp, and it allows finance to operationalize more of what the business is trying to do for its employees.”
Consolidated finance platform
For any expenses that couldn’t be put on a card, employees could easily submit reimbursements via Ramp and be paid back within three days. “Ramp brought something to the table that we didn’t have before, and that was [corporate] credit cards and reimbursements all in one system, with a single view, and a tool that interacted both with our backend and our frontend,” says Phil. Ramp enabled the finance team to consolidate its three-streamed expense management process into a single system. “That’s a massive change, and Ramp as a tool makes that possible and makes it easy,” Phil says. “We wouldn’t have been able to do that otherwise. Streamlining processes that touch 10,000+ users is not an easy undertaking.”
Deep ERP integration
The combination of automation and integration has been a game-changer for the finance team. “Ramp has certainly replaced some of our pre-existing processes with automation, but they’ve also replaced a lot of it with integration,” says Phil. “Take our HRIS and our ERP. Previously, a lot of our expense processes were outside of these systems, and our team had to work to bring them into our systems. Ramp lives within that ecosystem, and there’s no coding, there’s no adding data, there’s no adding levels of data to data that already exists. It’s there to begin with, and we can use it the whole way through.”
Christine agrees. “Ramp integrates really nicely into the various ERPs, and it also has fantastic API functionality where we can extract the data, bring it into our data warehouse, and leverage it to generate more reporting insights that way.”
Less toil, greater visibility, and happier employees
No more reimbursements, a welcomed change
By implementing Ramp, Shopify drastically reduced the time it took to reimburse employees. “In a lot of cases, [the reimbursement timeline is] down to zero,” says Phil. “We support our employees from the start by not requiring them to pay for something.”
“Ramp killed expense reports,” Phil adds with glee. “When you announce internally that you’re taking away expense reports and you’re rolling out a new system, and you get 200 threaded comments of ‘thank you, I can’t believe we’re doing this’—that doesn’t happen for finance teams. That is not typical of us releasing new systems.”
Cost savings
The benefits of eliminating expense reports extend beyond employee morale. Christine notes that implementing Ramp has led to real cost savings.
“What’s the cost of an expense report for a company?” she says. “Some of the external benchmarks I’ve seen have been between $8 and $25 per expense report, which is a lot of money when you think about the number of employees we have. [Now our expense reporting] is seamless, as it should be,” she says. “It should be a painless process, and Ramp has really knocked that out of the park.”
Faster close leading to greater financial health
Shopify’s month-end close process has improved as well. “The month-end close, specific to credit cards and employee reimbursements, was a tough one,” says Phil. “Before Ramp, month-end close for expenses looked something like four people working for three days reviewing and approving data in three different systems. That process not only has changed with Ramp—a lot of it doesn’t exist anymore. All our data is in one system, and we don’t need to bring it across because it’s already been synced to our ERP. It’s already waiting for month-end close to happen.” With Ramp, Shopfiy has saved over 120 hours at month-end close.
The constant influx of transaction data from Ramp and the real-time spend visibility it provides has opened new possibilities for the finance team. “The previous state was that we knew about spend when told about it, when someone was requesting the reimbursement. We had no control,” says Phil. “Now, the pure ability to react in a timely manner has completely changed. We can actually keep up with the company now, whereas before we couldn’t. Now, we’re running alongside our employees and actually supporting them in real time.”
“The real-time spend data that’s available from Ramp is critical to reaching that kind of leading or advanced state for expense management,” says Christine. “Not only are we seeing spend as it happens, we also have improved control over spend in advance. It’s also fantastic for our FP&A function to be able to have access to that real-time data and be able to flex budgets to incorporate that data into their planning and analysis for next year.”
Bringing the future of finance to Shopify
Ramp’s ability to offer a unified global experience is representative of the commitment to excellence Shopify has made to its employees. What’s more, it supports Shopify’s newly-instituted hybrid work model, which has come with an increase in employee travel “As a global, remote-first workforce, you can’t support employees in different regions in different ways,” explains Phil. “It has to look and feel the same. We didn’t think we could support global employees with a single instance and a single offering like we can with Ramp.”
Ultimately, Ramp has helped Shopify build an expense management system that reflects its scale and its values. “I think this is a great example of the beauty of software and the problems it can solve,” says Phil. “Imagine five years ago, you were trying to pitch that you wanted to increase control in your company by putting [corporate] credit cards in 10,000 people's hands. That pitch was never going to happen. We've done that. We put cards in everybody's hands, and we've increased our control and our awareness of spend. It's not because of the cards. It's because of the software. The power is the software.”
