How Tomo drove efficiency and slashed time to close with Ramp

Tomo is proud to have no official expense policy: a decision that empowers employees and reflects trust in their decision-making. “A seemingly endless expense policy, though, requires some oversight moderation,” says Tomo VP of Marketing Will Begeny. 

Tomo’s legacy expense management system made oversight cumbersome and time-intensive. “We had to work in multiple systems,” explains VP of Finance Eric Ho. “There were three separate systems for Accounts Payable, card management and reimbursement, and travel.” Accounting for various expenses across these systems required frequent receipt-chasing, and reconciling everything took considerable time. “It pushed out our monthly close timeline, because it was just not automated in any way,” says Eric. Without automation, the team also couldn’t set recurring expense rules to simplify the coding process. “Every single expense that came through corporate cards or people’s reimbursements had to be adjusted every single time,” Eric says.

The ramifications of multiple manual systems affected more than just the finance team: they didn’t provide a positive user experience for new employees. “We had to set up each new hire manually outside of our current HRIS system,” explains Tomo VP and Head of People Kim Rodgers. “Sometimes, we would forget if someone left or if someone was joining us, particularly when we were hiring frequently, and we had no way to automate payroll.” 

Tomo’s fragmented manual system was not sustainable. The team sought an automated all-in-one solution that could alleviate pressure on the finance team, enhance visibility and control over spend, and improve the user experience across the organization.

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Tomo partnered with Ramp to consolidate its multiple disparate systems into an all-in-one expense management platform. With Ramp, the finance team has set automated expense rules in order to simplify recurring expenses and expedite accounting. “Now, we can set a rule for a vendor, so every time an expense flows through it’s coded to a certain GL account and department, and we never have to touch it again,” says Eric. “When you multiply that by hundreds of expenses flowing through every month, we’ve been able to save so much time from an operational standpoint.” What’s more, the finance team no longer has to log into multiple systems to complete tasks--everything is consolidated in one central place, which provides greater visibility and drives efficiency across the department.

Ramp’s integration with Tomo’s HRIS system, UKG, has made onboarding and offboarding employees seamless. “This integration cuts out any manual error when it comes to inputting employee information or accidentally forgetting to close the loop when someone is joining or leaving. It’s automatic -- it takes all pressure off HR,” says Kim. 

With Ramp, Tomo has been able to keep its “no policy” expense policy while instituting some controls -- issuing Ramp cards for travel and other corporate expenses, for example. The result is a finance team that has a better understanding of company expenditures, and an employee base that feels trusted and supported.

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Centralizing and automating with Ramp has significantly increased the efficiency of the accounting operation. “It’s efficient across the board for people who are reviewing expenses,” says Eric. “The automated coding, all the controls you can implement around cash -- it’s all very important in accounting. And it’s cut our monthly close time in half: it used to take us 15 business days to close the books, and now it takes us around 8.”

That efficiency is huge for the finance team, but its ease of use extends to all employees across the organization. “We get great feedback from teammates,” says Kim. “Our business development team, for example, has really nice things to say about the user experience and the interface, the ease of submitting receipts and getting all of that approved.” Whereas Tomo’s legacy system included a lag time for reimbursement, utilizing Ramp cards has reduced the need to make reimbursements -- a positive for the accounting team and employees alike.

Instituting Ramp has also made Tomo more audit-ready. “We’ve been able to set a workflow for every invoice,” says Eric. “Our auditors love all the separation of duties. It’s very nice to know that if our auditors ask us to show the approval workflow for a bill, I can send screenshots right from Ramp on the lifecycle of approvals.” This is made easier by Ramp’s smooth integration with NetSuite, Tomo’s ERP system. “Whenever a journal entry or selection is made from our auditors, I look it up in NetSuite, and it has a direct link back to Ramp,” Eric says. “I’m able to find our auditors’ selections within seconds.” 

For a small startup team, the efficiencies Ramp has realized are invaluable. “It’s freed up time that we already didn’t have,” says Kim. “We’re already over capacity as a small team, and Ramp has brought us to a level of capacity that adds us to focus on more value-add stuff. From the HR perspective, Ramp has taken some of that excess minutiae and allowed our focus to shift a bit.” 

The same is true on the accounting side. “Bringing our close timeline down by half has given us so much more time for projects and analysis. We’re able to close the books and slowly review each account,” says Eric. “We can figure out what changed month-over-month as opposed to spending the whole month rushing out financials, then having human error and making mistakes. Automating the process and instituting a slower review has provided more accuracy.” 

“There’s no drain on the system,” says Will. “You can actually just focus on the things that everybody needs, and not retroactively figure out why we were paying twice for something we don’t need and reconciling these on a monthly basis. Ramp has made life so much easier.”

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