The Total Economic Impact™ Of Ramp

Spend Leakage Reduction

Evidence and data. Interviewees said that Ramp’s controls, including automated blocking, policy-driven AI flagging, AI-generated receipt detection, and manager visibility, drove meaningful reductions in spend that previously fell outside policy or went undetected.

• The manager of financial systems in manufacturing stated that after a retrospective review conducted before adopting Ramp, they determined that 4% to 5% of all spend was leakage (e.g., against policy, fraudulent, or otherwise shouldn’t have occurred); after Ramp, they reduced leakage to 0.4%. On the reimbursement side, the interviewee observed a similar trend: “Since we moved to Ramp, Ramp’s AI suggests rejecting between 4% to 5% of reimbursements. Before Ramp, we were rejecting less than 1% of reimbursements. Our wellness stipend is $225 per quarter per employee, and someone spent $2,500 on a golf membership in one quarter. And that was only caught in an audit.”

• The senior vice president of finance, accounting, and legal in the e-commerce industry described a behavioral shift tied to visibility: “I think what was happening was there was excess employee spend, and the fact that with Ramp it became very transparent meant the finance team could very easily see what the spend was on which category and by which department, and we could have the tough conversations. It became very clear to people.” The interviewee estimated the resulting reduction: “Over time, I’m seeing that we’re spending less than our budget. Our budget is roughly $1.2 million; we’re coming in 10% to 15% below it. The cost was people going out or big lavish meals and upgrading on airlines. [Reducing] those kinds of excesses created the 10% reduction.”

• The accounting manager in the software industry described the controls under the new system: “We have a Ramp AI take a first stab at reviewing expenses against our travel and expense (T&E) policy to make sure they’re in line, which also helps the manager be confident with reviewing and approving expenses. We’ve had managers flag to us when employees spent over their per diem and had to claw back funds from those employees. Prior to the platform, managers didn’t have a lot of visibility into their team spend. So it was harder for them to flag per diems or out-of-policy spend. It was more on the finance team, and there’s thousands of transactions, so it’s harder for us to keep track of all the per diem overages.”

• The chief accounting officer in the software industry described the control benefit and a specific category of risk avoidance for software spend made possible by Ramp’s category-level card restrictions: “For somebody to purchase software, they have to go through a request, which ultimately could lead to a Ramp card if it’s a small enough dollar value. But for security to have oversight, we have the right flows in place. If the person requesting clicks on software as a category, it’s going to go to our security team to evaluate.” The interviewee estimated the cost avoidance associated with keeping unauthorized AI and software tools off the company’s cards at around $100K and contrasted the results with their previous environment: “There were no limitations on [previous cards] — if you had a [previous card] limit, you could spend that limit on anything. So there was a 100% chance it would go through, and we would have 70% compliance on receipts.”

• The operations team lead in the software industry also described how their prior platform offered essentially no ability to block spend. The interviewee flagged an emerging control challenge that Ramp is addressing: “Before Ramp, everyone still had to have a receipt, but people who didn’t were producing AI-generated receipts. So that’s been a new change for us that we’ve had to consider, and Ramp has an AI agent that pulls out any receipt that looks like it’s AI generated.”

• The same interviewee also described the impact of preapproval spend limits on day-to-day spend behavior: “You cannot spend in Ramp unless you were preapproved for spend. So once you hit that threshold, you have to request more. That blocking happens daily.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite processes 2.7% of its spend in Year 1, 2.9% in Year 2, and 3.1% in Year 3.

• Before Ramp, the composite experienced 5% spend leakage per year.

• With Ramp, it reduces spend leakage to 0.5% per year.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary for organizations based on:

• Variability in baseline leakage levels.

• Budget processed with Ramp.

• Degree of adoption of Ramp’s controls and workflows.

• Manager engagement and enforcement consistency across an organization.

• Policy clarity and governance maturity.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $3.4 million.

Finance Team Productivity And Operating Leverage

Evidence and data. Interviewees described how Ramp reduced the manual effort required for monthly close, reconciliation, and reimbursement and corporate card transaction processing for finance and accounting teams. Before adopting Ramp, these teams were heavily involved in time-intensive, repetitive tasks ranging from reconciling transactions and reviewing every expense to fulfilling ad hoc reporting requests and correcting coding errors during month-end. With Ramp’s automation, AI-driven policy enforcement, and embedded analytics, they were able to proactively handle or eliminate much of this work. As a result, teams saved time on day-to-day activities and close cycles. They also shifted their focus toward higher-value analysis and strategic initiatives while supporting business growth without adding incremental headcount.

• The operations team lead in the software industry described the pre-Ramp accounting burden on a weekly process, saying: “It would take me probably half to two-thirds of a day to sync all of the accounting transactions from [one prior tool] to [another prior tool], versus Ramp. Now with Ramp, it’s an hour at most.” The interviewee also highlighted how AI policy agents changed the review workload: “Ramp will separate review items according to what fit the policy and was safe to approve. And then the ones it flags are ones it thinks we should have a better look at. So that’s helpful because I could cut probably 80% of the expense approvals and say those are approved. Then I only look into the 20% that got flagged.”

• This interviewee also described the reduction in ad hoc reporting labor that had previously consumed time: “I was having to send all of our financial planning and analysis to procurement directors. With Ramp, they are able to self-serve now.” Those activities took an average of 2 to 3 hours per week in ad hoc requests, which Ramp’s self-serve reporting and insights dashboard eliminated.

• The manager of financial systems in the manufacturing industry described a situation where the finance team managing the entire card and reimbursement program included just two people: “Other companies have five to seven people on their T&E teams. When I tell [other companies] we only have me and one other person, they say, ‘What? How is that possible?’” The interviewee tied this directly to the platform’s automation, “In the day-to-day, we’re not super involved because it’s all controlled and automated within Ramp.”

• The same interviewee also mentioned that lost card handling, which previously generated up to two requests per day was now handled directly by employees in the platform with no finance team involvement. Ramp’s manager dashboards and built-in analytics also replaced what had previously required an analyst, a SQL database, and a Power BI connection.

• The accounting manager in the software industry described eliminating a previous coding burden during close: “During month-end, we had our second accountant basically download the entire report, go through it, and make sure the coding was correct. If we didn’t know what a charge was for, we would have to message the requestor during month-end to figure it out.” Ramp’s AI-based autocoding changed this workflow fundamentally. The interviewee explained: “The only thing that the accounting team really now worries about is having the right coding to sync to our ERP system. And we do that up front throughout the month.”

• The senior vice president of finance, accounting, and legal in the e-commerce industry described that the prior, pre-Ramp close process added one-and-a-half to two days. Now, receipt compliance review alone is up to 6 hours faster per close cycle, saving up to 80 hours per year. The platform’s automation and integration relieved a workload, as this interviewee explained: “Earlier, it used to be a person’s job — one job dedicated to pulling all the expenses together and chasing people down. All of that’s now done through Ramp.”

• The manager of financial systems in the manufacturing industry also described how the platform enabled their team to absorb a four-times growth in transaction volume without a proportional increase in headcount: “We’re spending between $18 million and $19 million a month on corporate card and then between $3 million and $4 million on reimbursements. And before Ramp, it was around $3 million on corporate card and probably around a couple hundred thousand on reimbursements.” Under the old process, the interviewee noted: “The team would have even needed someone for corporate cards alone. There are multiple requests a day to either get a new card or lift a limit or change restrictions that someone would have to be managing.”

• The operations team lead in the software industry anticipated continuing to scale headcount without expanding the finance team: “We don’t feel like we need to expand our team anymore because of Ramp. So we will continue to expand our employee base, but we do not need any additional headcount because of the AI functionality.”

• The manager of financial systems in the manufacturing industry noted that payroll, which had been a required step in the old approval chain, was cut out entirely thanks to the platform’s AI policy agents and automated approval routing: “Every single reimbursement before Ramp also actually got routed to our payroll team to do a final approval. And with Ramp, with all of its auditing on platform, all of its AI policy approval suggestions, we fully removed payroll from needing to approve any reimbursements.” The interviewee estimated that this saved the payroll team up to two days every two weeks that were previously spent reviewing reimbursements.

• The senior vice president of finance, accounting, and legal in the e-commerce industry identified an avoided hire: “I know we were going to hire one more person if we didn’t get Ramp. So we saved at least 1,000 hours a year.” The interviewee also noted the team could reallocate capacity rather than cut it, using new capacity to figure out bank reconciliations and vendor negotiations and renewals. The interviewee added, “We also had attrition on the team that we didn’t have to backfill.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The equivalent of ten FTEs from the finance team save 20% of their time using Ramp, which they reallocate to higher-value tasks. These time savings equate to two finance FTEs.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for a finance team member is $120,000.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary for organizations based on:

• Prior state inefficiencies and process maturity.

• Adoption of Ramp, change management, and process and behavior change across employees and approvers.

• Variability in transaction volume and organizational scale.

• Differences in reporting needs and stakeholder demand on the finance team.

• Integration and data quality dependencies specific to an organization.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $537,000.

Employee And Manager Productivity

Evidence and data. Interviewees described how Ramp streamlined end-to-end expense submission and approval processes, significantly reducing manual effort and improving compliance. By centralizing receipt capture, automating data entry, and introducing intelligent approval workflows, Ramp removed many of the friction points that previously slowed employee expense submissions and manager reviews. The result was a faster, more intuitive experience that saved time per transaction and scaled efficiently alongside organizational growth.

• The manager of financial systems in the manufacturing industry reported that locating and uploading each receipt to an expense report in their prior environment took about 5 minutes but now takes under 1 minute with Ramp. The interviewee attributed this improvement to Ramp’s cleaner mobile app experience, saying: “In our last platform, you had to take a picture of everything or email it to yourself, put it in a folder, and then upload it. And now it’s just all in the app. Super easy.” Additionally, the interviewee noted that Ramp’s AI-based receipt parsing further reduced friction: “Ramp reads the receipt and fills in most information. So the average employee pretty much just has to type in a description and doesn’t really have to type in the vendor, the amount, the category, or other fields.”

• The operations team lead in the software industry described similar relief with receipt compliance, which had been a persistent problem under their organization’s prior system: “Ramp reminds employees to upload their receipts, and you can even turn off access to cards if the receipts are not uploaded in the number of days per organizational policy. From an audit perspective, when auditors are asking you for evidence of a receipt from a year ago and you don’t have it, that looks really bad and is really embarrassing. That doesn’t happen in Ramp.” The interviewee explained that employees now submit stipend, work from home, and travel expenses easily via the app, and a receipt that previously took employees 2 to 5 minutes to submit takes under one minute with Ramp.

• The accounting manager in the software industry said that in their prior environment, employees needed to open several apps and send receipts across different channels. With Ramp, employees have SMS text submission and channel integration, which improved follow-through. Employees now spend less than 1% of their time in Ramp.

• For managers, Ramp’s AI approval suggestions decreased review effort. The manager of financial systems in the manufacturing industry stated that in their prior environment, managers often skipped reviews, which led to spend leakage. The interviewee discussed the improvement with Ramp: “For the managers who were correctly approving — which in the old system meant going to the platform, clicking on the reimbursement, looking at the receipt, and making sure it matched — it would probably take at least 3 minutes per reimbursement. And now, when someone clicks on [an item], Ramp gives AI suggestions to approve, review, or reject and add the reasoning. So it’s probably closer to 30 seconds per reimbursement with Ramp.”

• The operations team lead in the software industry said, “Approving expenses probably took up half of my work week, and now I would say the approvals could take 1 hour in the morning each morning of the week.” The interviewee explained that managers can bulk approve in-app or on mobile, and AI policy agents separate compliant versus flagged items. The interviewee estimated that managers can approve around 80% of requests without detailed review and summarized the combined effect, saying: “Our number of employees doubled and yet we cut our time [to approve requests] from 20 hours to 5 hours. That’s one-fourth of the time for double the employee count.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• On average, an employee submits 36 expense reports annually (three per month) each with at least one receipt.

• Each expense report takes an average of 10 minutes to submit.

• Employees save 67% of their time submitting each expense report using Ramp’s integrations and automated field inputs.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for an employee is $48.

• Before Ramp, managers spent 3 minutes approving each expense report.

• Managers save 82% of their time on approvals using Ramp’s automation and AI suggestions.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for a manager is $70.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary for organizations based on:

• Maturity of expense management processes in the prior state.

• Number of employees using Ramp.

• Reimbursement requests at an organization before and after Ramp.

• Manager reliance on AI-assisted approvals, policy enforcement and reminder configuration, and Ramp feature deployment.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.7 million.

Legacy Environment And IT Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees said their organizations reduced and, in some cases, fully eliminated costs associated with legacy expense, reimbursement, and T&E platforms after deploying Ramp. Interviewees described decommissioning standalone expense tools, transitioning away from fixed platform fees on travel solutions, and replacing internally built systems that required ongoing maintenance and data engineering support. In addition to direct vendor cost savings, these changes eliminated underlying infrastructure and process costs tied to maintaining homegrown systems and managing fragmented workflows across multiple tools. In several cases, the shift to Ramp also resulted in incremental financial benefits, such as cash-back rebates from corporate card use and the potential to retire adjacent financial tools, further improving the overall cost structure of expense and payments operations.

• The accounting manager in the software industry described decommissioning a prior expense platform, “We also decommissioned [prior tool] which was $800 a month for a portion of our international team.” The chief accounting officer at the same organization estimated that the transition to Ramp also reduced the cost of their previous travel platform: “We’re still on the travel platform for travel, so we weren’t able to get rid of that altogether. But now we just pay a per-travel fee, so we don’t have to pay their platform fee. That reduced that cost.” This interviewee estimated the reduction at 30% of the total cost of the prior T&E platform.

• The manager of financial systems in the manufacturing industry described decommissioning a homegrown reimbursement system: “Our homegrown system was owned by our software team. So now they don’t have to keep up the maintenance of this program or try to troubleshoot any bugs. The homegrown system was old and we weren’t updating it at all. So it was really only maintenance or troubleshooting. If we had to update the reporting and bug fixes regularly, it probably would have been equivalent to one FTE.” Additionally, the previous process required significant data engineering to move card data from the bank portal into systems employees could actually use. The interviewee explained: “Once an employee spent on their card, we had to create this whole other data transformation to get the data from [prior issuer] back into our system so the employees could see it and submit everything. So there was a lot of different manual steps and data movement.” Ramp replaced that entire pipeline.

• The operations team lead in the software industry migrated from two previous tools, one of which introduced accounting workflow problems that generated ongoing manual effort. The interviewee also described a specific general ledger coding problem one tool created: “Credit cards could not be amortized. So for any flights that were purchased in a different period, we had to make manual journal entries in our ERP system, which was really cumbersome and took a lot of time.”

• The senior vice president of finance, accounting, and legal in the e-commerce industry replaced a fully manual spreadsheet-based expense process and moved reimbursement payments from ACH to Ramp’s corporate card. In doing so, they accessed its cash-back rebate program as a direct financial benefit. The interviewee is also considering migrating a current bill pay tool to Ramp, which he estimated would generate about $35,000 to $40,000 in annual savings. The interviewee said: “My only regret is that we didn’t use Ramp sooner. I wish that instead of two years ago, we [had implemented] Ramp four years ago.”

• Interviewees described that the ability to consolidate tools in one platform rather than funding disparate tools increased Ramp’s appeal. The operations team lead in the software industry said, “Ramp was a really good deal — affordable in comparison to our other tools.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization saves $250,000 per year from decommissioning a legacy solution.

• The legacy solution required one FTE for ongoing maintenance.

• After adopting Ramp, the composite organization frees 10% of an IT FTE.

• The average fully burdened annual rate for an IT FTE is $130,000.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary for organizations based on:

• Delayed decommissioning timelines and residual costs in prior systems or workflows, if an organization chooses to retain portions of its prior infrastructure.

• Variability in internal system replacement and the extent of Ramp feature adoption.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $621,000.

Unquantified Benefits

Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

• International expansion support. Multiple interviewees said that Ramp eased operations across subsidiaries and geographies in ways that extended beyond cost savings. For example, the chief accounting officer in the software industry described the value of providing local currency cards across international entities, “Not needing to administer more than one platform, with local currency cards for all of our subsidiaries in one platform, has been a huge win for us.” The interviewee contrasted this with what an expansion of their prior platform would have looked like: “[Our prior tool] didn’t seem like it was trying to expand internationally. So we would have had to have local cards from local banks, and that would have led to multiple processes and multiple accounting efforts.” The accounting manager at the same organization confirmed the breadth of coverage, “We have local currency in most of our subsidiaries, all except two, because of Ramp.”
  The operations team lead in the software industry described a similar experience when their company added international entities: “We’ve expanded entities. We got a Canadian entity, and we got an EMEA entity that is usually a difficult one, but with Ramp we didn’t have any issues with giving them cards. Historically, some countries are difficult to give US cards to. But we didn’t have any struggles with that.” Ramp’s ability to extend cards in local currencies across jurisdictions without requiring local banking relationships meant new entities could be operationalized faster and with less administrative overhead.

• Vendor payment traceability and error isolation. With Ramp, interviewees set one-time virtual cards per vendor or invoice to ensure they paid the exact amount due and did not spend beyond the predetermined amount. Additionally, the senior vice president of finance, accounting, and legal in e-commerce said that Ramp’s virtual card per-vendor feature makes payment failures immediately diagnosable: “I think the biggest benefit I’ve seen is that if there’s an issue with the payment flow, I know exactly where it’s coming from because the card is assigned to a specific vendor. So if a payment doesn’t go through — sometimes it’s just the API connection or something on the payment gateway that doesn’t work — it becomes very easy to spot and correct because Ramp gives dedicated cards for specific vendors.” This per-vendor virtual card capability also provides a clean audit trail for individual vendor relationships without requiring any additional reconciliation work.

• Improved audit trail and policy compliance. Ramp measures every transaction that flows through against the expense policy and automatically flags out-of-policy transaction for employees. The operations team lead in the software industry also said that every employee must formally acknowledge the company’s travel and expense policy before using Ramp. They explained: “Every employee that joins the Ramp platform has to sign our travel and expense policy or they can’t log in upon their first entry. So it’s really easy to say, ‘Hey, you’ve seen this. We know that you’ve been made aware of this per the signature.’” This acknowledgment creates a documented, enforceable accountability baseline that didn’t exist before and changes the nature of conversations when employees submit out-of-policy expenses. The interviewee also noted the platform’s audit trail makes those conversations easier: “There’s a lot of coverage and audit trails, and it’s really easy to converse in the Ramp platform. You just comment back and forth to each other, and you can easily screenshot to them and say, ‘Hey this is what popped up. This is what we’re seeing. This is how it’s out of policy.’”

• Role-based and tiered credit limits. The accounting manager in the software industry described an administrative benefit of the platform’s automated, role-based credit limit assignment that eliminated a manual provisioning process: “The employee automatically gets their spend limit based on their level, whether they’re an individual contributor, a manager, or staff. So that is pretty much automated on the Ramp side. We don’t have to do that ourselves.” The interviewee contrasted this with the prior system, where “there was no way to differentiate between different levels of employees, so everyone was able to get the same limit.” Beyond the administrative time saved, this feature represents a controls improvement in which spend authority becomes automatically tied to seniority rather than requiring manual review and adjustment. Ramp also allows teams to pull custom fields into the platform or via an HRIS or ERP system.

• Employee experience and adoption. Several interviewees flagged employee satisfaction with the platform as a benefit in its own right. This was notable for the interviewees because they said employees typically resist expense tools. The manager of financial systems in the manufacturing industry said that after going live with reimbursements, “my CFO told me that he hasn’t heard one complaint about it. He thought that was insane.” The interviewee attributed much of this to three specific improvements employees noticed: the mobile app, AI-based receipt parsing, and faster reimbursement payback speed.
  On the third point, this interviewee explained: “Employees would get paid back every payroll period, so that’s every two weeks. And now it’s ad hoc as soon as you submit and it gets approved. So if I have a reimbursement today and it gets approved today as well, I could be paid back in two days.”
  The operations team lead in the software industry described how difficult tool adoption typically is at their company: “With pretty much every project, someone’s going to question it. Someone’s going to ask if it’s better, or why, and complain about it.” The interviewee contrasted this with the Ramp rollout: “[The employees] used to complain a lot about using [prior tool], but with Ramp, there’s a lack of complaints. And they are using it, despite that it is really hard to get buy-in on an expense tool.” The interviewee’s team won an internal award for the implementation because adoption among all 700 employees was achieved within two months, including during a companywide travel event.

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Ramp and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Emergency and last-minute spend enablement. Employees with a card may have several types of funds tied to it, enabling a spend type to be issued very quickly. The operations team lead in the software industry described an operational capability the platform provided to the events and marketing teams, “Any time that there’s an emergency payment — a sponsored dinner or a last-minute happy hour or something at one of our big events for the marketing team — they can submit a ticket and we send them a virtual Ramp card that day.” The interviewee said that the dollar stakes involved in these situations could be significant, “These events could be anything from a $10,000 dinner to a $50,000 hotel down payment.” Under the prior system, the same situation required the interviewee to send a check that day, which could take around 4 hours and derail their productivity. With Ramp, the operations team lead said that a virtual card was available immediately once they approved a spend request, with no wait for a physical card and no need to send a check.

• Guest card issuance for customers and partners. The operations team lead in the software industry said that Ramp enables them to send guest card invitations for when their company hosts events and wants to cover costs for customers or partners. The guest cards provide temporary, scoped spend access to nonemployees. They explained: “When our partnership team goes out and they give customers paid invitations to events, we can send the customers guest invites to Ramp. It’s secure. They can’t see anything. They’re not an employee. They’re not getting any budgets from us except for the one that we send them.” The interviewee contrasted this with the prior process, “We’d make these customers invoice us personally for their expenses, which is just not good practice.” The guest card feature eliminated an awkward and potentially off-putting billing arrangement with customers and partners.

• Potential cost savings through vendor negotiation and process optimization. By automating manual expense management processes and providing real-time visibility into spend, Ramp enables finance teams to reduce time spent on transactional activities. Interviewees noted that this allows finance leaders to focus on higher-value work, including financial planning, vendor negotiations, and process optimization. The operations team lead said Ramp’s self-serve reporting and insights dashboard created new capabilities for other teams as well because of the data visibility: “Procurement [team] is seeing how much we spent on certain tools to better negotiate.”
  The chief accounting officer in the software industry described a meaningful benefit at the leadership level: The CFO is simply no longer worried about T&E. The interviewee said, “Our CFO just doesn’t worry about travel and expense anymore, because we have the right controls in place to limit that. So I think that’s a win for her in that thought process. She’s definitely more top-line focused and driving growth there.”
  The operations team lead in the software industry framed a similar point from a forward-looking angle: “We want to eventually become a company that’s public. Ramp offers us the internal controls that we need without limiting the employee experience.” The platform’s controls infrastructure is being built at the interviewee’s organization with IPO readiness in mind, beyond just current operational efficiency.

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).