How Wu Yee keeps 12 Head Start sites on one grant plan, one purchase at a time
“I want to trust the people at our sites to buy what they need, when they need it. With everything in Ramp, they have one place to go and one set of rules to follow. And I can see how all of their spending ties back to the contracts that fund their work.”
CFO, Wu Yee Children’s Services
In her first week as CFO of Wu Yee Children’s Services, Marina Peterson picked her “first big win”: replacing the credit cards. After more than twenty years rebuilding nonprofit back offices, she knew what that change could do.
At her previous organization, Downtown Streets, she had moved the team from Concur to Ramp within months. It “changed the world,” she says: “People were actually coding their credit card transactions, and following the rules was easy.”
Wu Yee presented a chance to bring that experience home. Marina lives in San Francisco and knew the organization from her work at a community center that ran preschools. Founded in Chinatown fifty years ago, Wu Yee is now the city’s largest Head Start and Early Head Start provider, serving more than 500 preschool-aged children across 12 centers. Its fully subsidized preschools bring early education to families in the city’s lower-income neighborhoods.
The CFO role came with “carte blanche” to change the systems — and a clear place to start. When Marina arrived, the finance team spent the first two weeks of each month reconciling the previous month’s card statements and spreadsheets.
The more time it spent reconstructing the past, the less it had for the programs the children depended on.
12 sites, one card, and a statement nobody could read
Every purchase at Wu Yee carried two responsibilities: give educators what they needed to care for children and account for the grant dollars that made that care possible. Connecting those two responsibilities fell to the finance team, but the systems they inherited weren’t built to bring them together.
Everyday purchases were bottlenecked by a makeshift procurement tool and a process that routed approvals and purchasing through a single person with a card. Staff first submitted a request, producing purchase orders even for small items. Someone else then placed the order, but the approved request never matched to the eventual card charge. When staff needed an item quickly, those extra steps could mean waiting for essential supplies.
“Even for a pack of diapers, staff had to ask for permission first, then send the request to someone else to place the order, then try to match it back to an expense report. It was too time-consuming.”
— Marina Peterson, CFO
Once a purchase was made, the cards offered no way to match receipts to transactions. Employees assembled expense reports in spreadsheets, with receipts attached separately when they had them. Finance could see the card payment at month-end, but had to work backward to identify the individual purchases, who made them, and which site they served.
Vendor bills had their own routes. Some went through a bill-payment tool, some were uploaded to the bank as ACH files, and some were paid on the vendor's website, so learning whether a bill had been paid meant checking all three. “It was a Frankenstein Winchester mystery house of systems,” she says, “they did not talk to each other.”
A trail like that is an inconvenience anywhere. At an organization that is audited often and reimbursed by government funders, it was a risk to the funding itself.
“Our funders require the receipt behind every expense before they’ll reimburse us. But our systems didn’t connect the purchase, the receipt, and the accounting. We had to piece that trail together ourselves to show funders how their money had been spent.”
— Marina Peterson, CFO
Every grant dollar connected to the program it supported
Wu Yee went live on Ramp about two months after Marina started, with its first ten cardholders, and the bank cards were retired immediately. The team stood up their Ramp instance in a week, connected it to NetSuite, and the next week about fifty people across the organization held cards.
Cards where the need is
Marina started by giving each site manager a card with its own set of controls so they could buy what their centers needed themselves as those needs arose. Setting controls and limits for each card issued gave managers room to act within boundaries the finance team could see and adjust.
A receipt can follow the charge with a simple text message, so finance sees who made the purchase, which center it served, and the documentation behind it while the details are still fresh. The cards also connect to their Amazon Prime account for even easier ordering.
Accounts payable that answers to the funder
Then Marina brought vendor payments into Ramp so the AP team could receive, review, and pay invoices all in one place. Payment status stays with the bill, rather than forcing the team to check a payment tool, a bank upload, and a vendor site to learn whether it had been paid. The team now pays roughly 900 bills a month this way.
That made one policy possible. Marina spent two months rewriting Wu Yee's spending rules from scratch. Because cards and bills now start in the same place, the method no longer matters.
“Almost every dollar we spend now follows one path, one policy, and one source of truth in Ramp. If the system is intuitive enough that people actually want to use it, the policy stops feeling like a policy. It simply becomes how the organization works.”
— Marina Peterson, CFO
A checking account that earns interest while it pays the bills
With bills in one place, Marina turned to the account that pays them. She opened a Ramp Checking Account†, and Wu Yee now pays hundreds of vendor bills from it per month. The cash behind each payment lives in the same platform as the bill, the card, and the receipt, so finance sees the whole trail in one place. Wu Yee fronts its costs and waits for funders to reimburse them, and in the meantime the balance earns interest.
Grant rules that follow the money
Wu Yee's funding is blended, so a single purchase might be charged 25 percent to the federal government, 70 percent to the state, and 5 percent to the city, according to a cost allocation plan the organization publishes and its auditors expect it to follow. Before Ramp, people guessed. "We'll put it over here, put it over there," Marina says. "And when you go to audit, and we get audited a lot, they're like, why aren't you following your plan?"
So she wrote the plan into the purchase. Marina set up preset funding splits in Ramp so staff could divide each expense among the appropriate grants without calculating the percentages themselves. A manager buying food or classroom supplies could select the expense category and the funding split for their center.
A site manager can get what a classroom needs, and finance can show a funder how the purchase was paid for. Marina built both into the same process, so accountability follows the work instead of catching up weeks later.
A month-end that happens every day
For Marina, getting time back means having more of it to support Wu Yee’s mission. It shows up first in the paperwork funders ask for, then in the hours, and ultimately in how she plans the year.
With receipts and grant allocations connected to card transactions as purchases happen, over 98% of transactions now carry the documentation funders ask for.
More than 60 hours a month of coding, approvals, and bill entry now happen automatically for Marina’s team — time once spent routing orders through one cardholder, matching charges to requests and receipts and reconciling them after the fact.
That capacity gives Marina a clearer view across Wu Yee’s 12 sites. She can now see spending patterns by location and right-size card limits based on actual need. Her next goal is to put current financial statements in front of program managers, so they can see how their programs are tracking against budget and plan for what children need next.
“There was a lot of ambiguity before. Now we can have a different conversation. Not just ‘What did we spend?’ but ‘What do our programs need, and how can we make the most of what we have?’”
— Marina Peterson, CFO
Meanwhile, merchant rules, category restrictions, and cashback have quietly helped Wu Yee get more from its budget. Between cashback, interest in its Ramp Checking Account, and out-of-policy spend stopped at the point of purchase, more than $57,000 has stayed in the budget since switching to Ramp nine months ago.†
But the deeper shift is in how Wu Yee shows up to the people who fund its work. Nonprofits like Wu Yee that run on government grants operate under a unique kind of pressure: every dollar must be spent, tied to a deliverable, and documented before reimbursement. Unspent funds get returned, not saved, so the instinct is to spend it all. With spending visible in real time, when a program will finish under budget she can find out why and go back to her funders and build more trust.
"I can go back to them in good faith and say, we're going to meet our deliverables, but we're more cost-effective than we planned. Here's $100,000 back, where else can it be used?" she says. "That kind of transparency builds trust. And trust is what unlocks more funding for the children we serve.”
More trust means more funding. More funding means more programs. For Marina, that's the whole point.
“The exciting part for me is how much more we can do here,” she says. “I want the children we serve to have care that’s as good as—or better than—any private preschool. There’s so much opportunity to be innovative, to respond as families’ needs change, and to help these children reach their potential.”
