How WizeHire democratized decision-making with Ramp

As a fast-growing startup, WizeHire was stretched in various ways, and team members wore multiple hats. That made it difficult for the finance function to delegate responsibility to the rest of the team by setting up budgets and empowering employees to make secure, pre-approved purchasing decisions, and closing the books each month required significant time and effort.

“Prior to Ramp, we were actually closer to net 12 days [to close each month],” says WizeHire CEO Sid Upadhyay. The slow speed of operation did not align with WizeHire’s culture of execution, which favors granting agency to employees and enabling rapid decision-making.

“When we think about what’s holding us back, it’s execution speed,” says Sid. When it came to spend management, a clunky and antiquated system added time, effort, and risk to the team’s operations. “Before Ramp, we were actually with another upstart called Lola, which went through a shutdown in the middle of the pandemic. Prior to that, we were with AmEx. It was a terrible world where everyone was sharing one AmEx card, and one fraud event would literally just ruin thousands of transactions that we have set up,” explains Sid. “I’m almost flabbergasted that we made it that far with the one-card solution, because that would definitely not scale right now.” That unscalable solution also meant that WizeHire had no real way of enforcing spend control or limits which left Sid and his team chasing receipts and rogue spend. "In growth-oriented startups, time is actually our most expensive commodity, we want to execute and move fast.” WizeHire’s existing spend management and procurement processes were hindering that speed to execution.

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WizeHire needed a partner that could restore lost time to busy executives and support the company’s culture of autonomy and rapid execution. “We’d heard great things about Ramp and moved [quickly] in that direction,” says Sid. 

Ramp’s automated central platform allows WizeHire to issue cards to any employee who needs one and reduces the inefficient, insecure act of sharing cards among multiple employees. The team can set spend limits on individual cards, and those controls ultimately empower employees to act more quickly and deliberately. 

“With Ramp’s system, we’re able to -- and this is a big part of our value system -- let the team make the decisions that are best and most in their interests,” says Sid. “We’re able to really delegate that authority right down to the individual decision-maker.”

Since instituting Ramp, the WizeHire team has been able to reduce time to close to net 5 days from net 12 and streamline the expense reporting process. This helps drive day-to-day efficiency, and it also helps position WizeHire for easier, more timely accounting audits. 

“We just went through a financial audit,” says Sid. “That could have taken months, in terms of getting all the collateral and paperwork. With Ramp, it was all perfectly furnished, tied to the ERP. It was just an incredible experience. The end-to-end operations are exactly what they should be -- it’s a no brainer at the end of the day.”

Implementing Ramp has helped WizeHire address some of the ongoing challenges it faces as a growth-stage startup. “One of the biggest finance challenges that companies go through at this stage is not only having a plan but sticking to it and reporting and guiding accordingly,” explains Sid. “With Ramp, we get deep granularity and department-level coding. So we actually understand our ad spend by program, by P&L in the business. It gives a great amount of visibility, such that then decision-makers can act on it very expeditiously. We’re not waiting for one month for post-close to review analysis on how an ad strategy worked -- we know the next day how it worked.”

“A good example [of the savings we’ve realized with Ramp] is our experience negotiating a contract with Intercom,” says Sid. “We’ve been an Intercom customer since 2014. Every year, renegotiating was a hassle we had to deal with, and it’s a less effective use of time for our team.”

Ramp allows WizeHire rely on more accurate budgets and reallocate spend to areas of need. “Every department in WizeHire is experiencing rapid growth,” says Alicia Coleman, Marketing Operations Manager at WizeHire. “Being able to save along the way means that we have some wiggle room in terms of the tools we can bring on, the people we can hire. [The savings we’ve realized with Ramp] mean everything in terms of not only revenue return on the investment, but also operations in general.”

The WizeHire team appreciates Ramp’s always-on service, which has facilitated these cost-savings across the business. “In a time when it’s quarter close and you’re negotiating seven deals, the fact that Ramp has that much bandwidth, capacity, insights, API…it gives us a lot of comfort that we can come to Ramp at any point in the future,” says Sid. 

The assistance and savings Ramp has offered have become, in a relatively short span of time, instrumental for WizeHire. “Ramp is one of those secret advantages that maybe we shouldn’t be talking so much about,” says Sid. “But we are.”

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