How Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company runs $1M/month in AP in 20 minutes a day with Ramp

The short version

If your AP process still requires two or three people, multiple logins, and a phone call to the bank to confirm a payment cleared, the upstream problem isn't effort. The real issue is that cards, ACH, check, and vendor records are scattered across systems that were never designed to talk to each other, and the cost shows up as headcount.

Dan Abel Jr. is the co-owner of Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company, a 45-year-old St. Louis chocolatier that also operates Bissinger's, a second family brand with French origins dating to the 1600s. Together the two brands run more than 10 retail stores. In this webinar, recorded during Valentine's week, Dan walks through what it looks like to run AP for both brands himself, inside Ramp, in roughly 20 minutes a day.

Most useful for: Owners and finance leads at multi-location retailers, manufacturers, and seasonal businesses already running NetSuite.

Key results at Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company

• ~$1M per month in AP volume managed in roughly 20 minutes a day by a single operator
• 99% of bills in Ramp now paid by one person, with about 99% of payments running on ACH
• Vendor payment fixes compressed from a roughly week-long check cycle to a same-call resolution
• Went live during Q4, the quarter that drives 60%+ of annual revenue, with a few hours of initial setup

About Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company

Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company is a 45-year-old St. Louis chocolatier founded in February 1981, operating in food and beverage manufacturing and multi-location retail. The company also operates Bissinger's across more than 10 retail stores, with euro-denominated procurement from France baked into the seasonal supply chain. Finance leaders at seasonal businesses with multi-location retail and manufacturing under one roof will recognize the cash-cycle pressure.

Dan Abel Jr. is the co-owner of Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Company. He represented the team in this webinar.

Where was AP breaking at Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate?

Before Ramp, AP at Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate was a multi-system, multi-person operation. Bills were paid across a legacy AP platform and a physical checkbook, with multiple people on the team touching vendor payments every day.

In October 2023, the legacy AP system started glitching and temporarily stopped working, and the timing could not have been worse. Q4 is the runway into the quarter that drives at least 60% of annual revenue, and vendors needed to be paid in a matter of days.

Hard boxes for Valentine's Day were already purchased, paid for, and received in the warehouse by October, part of a procurement cycle that includes raw materials sourced from France in euros. Under the old process, fixing an incorrect payment meant calling the bank to cancel a check, reissuing it, and putting it in the mail, a cycle that could take a week.

For seasonal businesses where procurement cycles start months before any given holiday, that kind of payment latency carries real supply chain consequences.

Dan's read on the pattern across peer companies matched what he saw internally. When he asked other owners how they managed AP across multiple sites, the answers varied, but a common shape was two or three people doing work that one person could handle if the data lived in one place.

"It could take a week to fix the problem before because we would call the bank to cancel a check, to then go reissue another check, to then go put it in the mail and literally put a stamp on it."

Why Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate chose Ramp

Dan called every NetSuite-compatible AP platform he could find, ran an introductory call and a demo with each one inside a single week, and filtered on pros and cons. NetSuite integration was the floor, not a differentiator. What pulled Ramp ahead was the combination of corporate cards, virtual cards, and bill pay in one platform, plus invoice scanning that returned a correct read on the very first PDF the team fed it.

When the legacy system's glitches briefly subsided, the temptation to wait until January surfaced, but Dan refused to lose the momentum. The family reached a unanimous decision to move forward, and the Ramp implementation team committed to a fast-track rollout that included working with him into the night. The forcing function was already there.

"The Ramp team's been amazing. They're going to fast track an implementation and work with me into the night on this, so we're going. Then it's kind of like ripping off that band aid. Once we did, then it was, why did we not have this before?"

The rollout

Dan has rebuilt most of the company's tech stack since 2020, including a Shopify-to-NetSuite e-commerce integration, so he has a calibrated sense of what a hard implementation looks like, and Ramp cleared that bar.

Initial setup took a few hours and covered banking details, the invoice inbox, company information, and the first round of vendor records, with Ramp's implementation team supporting the configuration directly. From there, vendor onboarding happened on a rolling basis. Rather than migrating the full supplier list in a batch, Dan's team added each vendor the first time a new invoice came in.

For suppliers who hadn't shared banking details, Dan used Ramp's vendor-side request flow. He tells the supplier an email is coming and to fill it out, and says it takes them about 30 seconds.

"From e-comm implementations with Shopify to NetSuite, our entire tech stack has kind of been reborn since 2020, so we've really gone through and refreshed everything. And Ramp by far was the easiest. The user interface is pretty simple once you get that first session of just collecting the email address so it can go into the inbox."

The results

By the start of 2025, one person was running AP for two candy brands and more than 10 retail stores in roughly 20 minutes a day, with around $1 million per month flowing through that workflow.

Time reclaimed at the operator level. Dan personally pays 99% of the bills that run through Ramp in a 20-minute morning routine, five days a week. Under the old process, multiple people touched vendor payments across multiple systems every day. The work consolidated into one seat because the data arrives in Ramp already structured.

Payment cycle compression. Fixing an incorrect payment used to mean calling the bank to cancel a check, reissuing it, and mailing it, a process that took about a week. Now Dan can cancel a check and reissue payment while the vendor is on the phone. In a seasonal supply chain where Valentine's Day inventory and packaging are received in October and raw materials are procured months ahead from overseas, every day of payment latency compounds across cash flow.

Cross-currency procurement without the bank call. Bissinger's procures raw materials from France, so euro-denominated payments are a routine part of the AP cycle. Under the old process, a non-USD payment required a phone call to the bank to initiate a currency trade, which is now handled directly inside Ramp without a separate bank conversation.

A clean ledger across 10+ stores. Every store manager has a physical Ramp card, and recurring utility spend (electric, gas, internet across each retail store) flows through virtual cards, alongside Amazon, Shopify, and Meta purchases. Before Ramp, the company carried different credit cards with different issuers, but now card and ACH and check spend land in one vendor record, searchable in a few seconds.

"That month was chaotic because we were like, who did we pay on the old system? Who did we actually physically write a check to in that dwell time? Who did we pay on the new system? There was a lot of unknown, and there are multiple cooks in the kitchen essentially paying bills. If it was a Ramp payment, I could just log into the system and within ten seconds be like, yes, this was paid."

Day-to-day at Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate after Ramp

Over the past six months, the company hired a new remote director, and every store manager has a Ramp card. Many of those hires came from companies running older expense systems, and the comparison was immediate.

Dan's morning now opens with a single view. Invoice PDFs land in one AP inbox and get read by Ramp's invoice scanning features, while card spend and payments live in the same dashboard.

The human impact shows up in two directions. Store managers spend less time filing expense reports, and the operator running AP for both brands has reclaimed enough hours to handle the volume personally. Dan has had this conversation enough times on the golf course that his friends are "sick and tired" of hearing about Ramp.

"A lot of people that have come from different companies all were used to having an expense account or a company credit card and everyone has commented like, gosh, this [Ramp] is so easy…Ramp has been a lot more efficient for every single one of them."

Where should you start if this sounds familiar?

1. Open your last full month of AP and count how many people touched a vendor payment from invoice to settlement. If the number is greater than one, that's the gap worth closing.
2. Pick one recurring spend category (utilities is the cleanest) and map every location that pays into it. That list becomes your virtual card rollout.
3. Send the next vendor that asks for a check a request to provide banking details on ACH instead. Time how long it takes them to respond. That number is your honest baseline for how fast you can migrate the rest.

None of these steps takes more than an hour. The unstated argument underneath all three is that your AP operation doesn't need three people to run it in 2025, but rather one person and the right data model.

Final thoughts

"If it takes three people, it's not working. So, it's 2025, it's 2026. Let's move on. We are in a technological world. This is all to be done at your fingertips."

Dan's argument isn't a technology argument so much as an operator argument made by someone who absorbed the CFO role himself and decided 20 minutes a day was the right shape for it. The peer companies he describes on the golf course are running the same problem he was running into in October 2023, and most of them haven't had a forcing function yet.

Pick one category and start there.

See how Ramp fits in

If your AP process today still requires more than one person, more than one login, or a phone call to your bank to confirm a payment, the upstream problem is that cards, ACH, check, and vendor records are not living in the same system. Ramp consolidates them, integrates with NetSuite, and gives the operator a ten-second lookup on any payment in flight.

Common questions finance teams are asking

Which Ramp products did Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate use together?

Corporate cards, virtual cards, and bill pay, inside a single Ramp account, integrated with NetSuite. Every store manager gets a physical card, while recurring categories (utilities per location, Amazon, Shopify, Meta) each get their own virtual card.

Bills flow through an AP inbox that Ramp's invoice scanning function reads on arrival. The point of buying them together is that the location and category are attached at the moment of spend, so reconciliation stops being a separate job.

How long does it take to go live if you're already on NetSuite?

At Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate, initial setup ran a few hours. This covered banking details, setting up the AP inbox, company information, and the first round of vendor records. Vendor onboarding then happened on a rolling basis, one supplier at a time, as new invoices came in.

The company went live during Q4, the quarter that drives 60%+ of their annual revenue. The rule of thumb is that you don't need a quiet quarter to switch, only a forcing function and a few uninterrupted hours.

When do you start seeing payback?

Dan saw it inside the first month, when two systems were running in parallel and he could answer "was this invoice paid?" in about ten seconds instead of pulling a legacy report or opening the physical checkbook. At roughly $1 million per month in AP volume, the difference between a ten-second lookup and a ten-minute reconstruction is the job itself, and payback is mostly a function of how many people currently touch each payment.

Does this model work for a mid-market, multi-location business or only for larger finance teams?

Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate operates two candy brands across more than 10 retail stores with roughly $1 million per month in AP volume running through Ramp, with one person handling 99% of the bills inside it. If your company has multiple locations, a mix of recurring and ad-hoc vendor spend, and a stack already anchored on NetSuite, Ramp fits well here.

If you're a single-location business with a handful of vendors, the consolidation math still holds, though the payoff is less dramatic. Finance teams at similar companies who want to sharpen their forecasting approach for seasonal procurement cycles can also explore Inside the Forecast Live: 6 Models, Tradeoffs, and When to Use Them, which covers the tradeoffs between different forecasting methods for high-performing teams.

What about international vendor payments?

Bissinger's procures raw materials from France, so euro-denominated payments are part of the routine AP cycle. Multi-currency payments run inside Ramp without a separate phone call to the bank to initiate a currency trade. For a seasonal supply chain where Valentine's Day inventory is bought and paid for the prior October, removing the bank-call bottleneck is what keeps the cash cycle moving.