San Marcos Unified gives maintenance teams room to act — and finance a clear record of their spend across 19 schools
“A well-run district should not have to choose between getting work done at the school site and keeping control of the dollars behind it. We're not hiring more people to do more jobs, so we have to be smarter about the process. With Ramp, the purchase, the receipt, and the record stay together from the start. ”
Director of Purchasing, San Marcos Unified School District
In public school finance, the middle can be the hardest place to operate.
San Marcos sits between the Pacific coast and the inland hills of North San Diego County. Its school district sits between the funding realities of the two regions: wealthier coastal areas with high property-tax bases, and inland communities that receive more supplemental funding for serving populations most in need.
“We have to figure out how to be smarter in the way we do things, process-wise,” says Nick Brizeno, Director of Purchasing at San Marcos Unified School District, “because since San Marcos is funded by the state, we're not receiving the money needed to fund extra support.”
That pressure shows up in the work orders that start a school day: a replacement part from Home Depot before a repair stalls or a pipe for an irrigation leak before a facilities problem worsens. These are not headline purchases, but they decide whether a classroom stays usable, a campus stays safe, and the school day keeps moving.
Nick could see the gap widening between a repair and its record. If a maintenance worker could get across town for the part, the purchase trail needed to be just as ready. It had to be clear enough for finance, fast enough for the field, and practical enough for a district where every hour mattered.
Store cards weren’t built for school districts
The district’s purchasing process had grown around the places maintenance teams actually went: Home Depot, Lowe’s, Grainger, plumbing supply houses. Each store solved one immediate need, but together they created a system that asked field teams and finance staff to hold too much in their heads.
One maintenance employee might carry multiple store cards and work across six or eight open purchase orders, each tied to a different vendor, department, school site, or service type. When the fiscal year changed, the PO numbers changed with it. A vendor could keep an old number on file, a worker could use the wrong one, and the accounting team would have another invoice to unwind.
The paperwork was just as fragmented. A work order explained the repair. A receipt proved the purchase. A statement showed the charge. But those pieces often traveled on different timelines, through different hands, and sometimes not at all.
“You have people in the field doing the work, and you’re also expecting them to turn in everything. Let’s be real: if they’re moving job to job and store to store, the likelihood of misplacing a receipt is pretty high.”
— Nick Brizeno, Director of Purchasing, San Marcos Unified School District
That left people at the the office like Simone Nikom reconstructing what the field had already lived. Simone, the Maintenance and Operations admin secretary, helped sort and code purchases before they reached accounts payable.
Accounting had to manually match paper receipts to store statements, delaying payments by 60 to 90 days. Because record-keeping lagged behind completed repairs, vendor accounts were routinely frozen.
Ultimately, this messy mix of store cards, open purchase orders, paper receipts, and month-end cleanup had become the default system for keeping schools running.
One controlled card system for work that does not happen in one place
San Marcos Unified was among the first public school districts to bring Ramp into the realities of K-12 finance.
Its rollout had to accommodate a board-adopted budget, county-held funds, and payment mechanics unlike those of a conventional business. That made the rollout a partnership, not a plug-and-play implementation. Ramp had to learn the terminology, approval paths, documentation needs, and credit-limit questions that matter to school districts.
“All through the evaluation, it never felt like Ramp was walking away. It always felt like they were trying to figure out how to make this work for a school district.”
— Nick Brizeno, Director of Purchasing, San Marcos Unified School District
Access that matches the work
In 8 short weeks, the team had rolled out Ramp. Nick’s first goal once live: keeping the work order, receipt, and purchase together from the start. San Marcos Unified built its Ramp program around that standard.
Maintenance could buy unexpected parts on the fly without leaving finance waiting until month-end to understand what was bought, why it was needed, and whether the record was complete.
In addition, the district looked into areas to expand the program, like Kids on Campus, the district’s after-school care initiative. With narrower purchasing needs, staff could shop at Smart & Final or Costco without risking unauthorized spending.
This allowed the district to tailor controls to each program’s specific buying requirements rather than forcing finance to resolve exceptions line by line. Purchasing workflows no longer lived in binders, memories, or post-purchase explanations—they traveled directly with the card.
A record that starts in the field
That change showed up clearest in the maintenance team’s day-to-day. One Ramp card replaced multiple store cards. One PO associated with Ramp replaced separate open POs across several vendors. When a maintenance employee made a purchase, the related work-order number tied the transaction back to the repair that prompted it.
The receipt moved into the same flow. After the charge, Ramp texts the employee, and the employee replies with a photo. The record starts while the purchase is still fresh, before a statement arrives and before a receipt has time to disappear into a truck, a pocket, or a pile of paper back at the shop.
“One maintenance employee used to mean three store cards and six POs. Now each employee has one Ramp card, each department has one PO, and they don’t even have to know the PO number. It’s there in the background.”
— Nick Brizeno, Director of Purchasing, San Marcos Unified School District
That gave San Marcos Unified a cleaner way to see the work behind the spend. A purchase could show the site, the job type, the work order, and the receipt. What used to be a line on a statement could now help the district understand which campuses, repairs, and recurring problems were driving demand.
A district record that starts before month-end
San Marcos Unified no longer has to wait for monthly statements to understand maintenance spend. With work-order numbers added at purchase, receipts captured by text, and Simone categorizing transactions each week, the team has cut about 40 hours from month-end close work.
“It can just be done incrementally as part of your daily routine versus having to do it at the 30th day. That switch — that’s where the savings are.”
— Nick Brizeno, Director of Purchasing, San Marcos Unified School District
For a district that is not adding headcount to absorb more administrative work, the more durable gain is capacity: fewer receipts to chase, fewer POs to manage, fewer statements to reconstruct, and more time for staff to spend on work that supports schools directly.
“A lot of the savings we look for in process change are soft savings. It’s workload. If we can reduce the paper pushing and help people focus on other important tasks, that matters.”
— Nick Brizeno
Faster close work isn’t the only return. In the first six months, San Marcos Unified saw an estimated 2.8× ROI on their annual subscription costs for using Ramp Plus through a combination of cashback, policy controls, and avoided cleanup work
What matters to Nick isn’t the exact math behind the return. It is that the same operating model that makes spend faster also makes it more accountable. Cashback gives the district value back on purchases it already needs to make. Controls help keep spend inside policy before it becomes cleanup work. And by routing purchases through the right funds, programs, receipts, and work-order context from the start, Ramp makes the faster path the better-documented path.
San Marcos Unified’s district-wide mission is to be future ready. For Nick, that’s not only a promise made in classrooms. It is also the quieter work of making sure the systems behind each school day can keep up with the people doing the work.
