Ramp Simplifies Finance For Growing Fitness Brands

The AI-powered finance platform Ramp is streamlining financial operations for growing fitness brands by unifying spending, payments, and accounting. This integration aims to reduce administrative tasks, enhance financial oversight, and facilitate more efficient scaling for multi-unit businesses.

Charlie DeSocio, an enterprise account executive at Ramp, highlighted a common challenge faced by expanding fitness companies: disparate purchasing and payment systems across different locations. This fragmentation can lead to difficulties in oversight, with teams using various tools for expenses, travel, and accounting, sometimes even in different currencies. DeSocio noted that employees often found expense processes cumbersome, particularly on mobile, while finance departments struggled with approvals, project tracking, and international transactions.

“Its corporate team had different systems for purchasing, expenses, travel and accounting,” DeSocio recalled. “Employees found parts of the expense process cumbersome, especially on mobile, while finance needed more reliable ways to handle approvals, projects and international activity.”

Ramp addresses this by connecting purchasing, approvals, payments, and accounting into a single platform. The system automates the steps between these functions, eliminating the need for manual transaction processing and tracking. Ramp can capture invoice details, create bills for review, and route them through appropriate approval workflows based on company policies. It can also match bills to purchase orders and sync accounting data to systems like NetSuite, thereby reducing reconciliation needs and improving spend visibility.

Woman practicing pilates on a reformer machine in a fitness studio, showcasing strength and flexibility. Illustrative stock photo via Pexels.

This automation frees up finance teams to focus on more strategic initiatives rather than repetitive, manual work. For instance, processing an invoice for equipment purchase typically involves capturing details, assigning projects, obtaining approvals, making payments, and recording the transaction in the accounting system. When these steps are managed across separate tools, significant time is lost moving information. Ramp’s automation handles a larger portion of this work, allowing teams to concentrate on exceptions and higher-value tasks.

For fitness studios where employees frequently make purchases across multiple locations and are often away from their desks, managing receipts can be a significant burden. Ramp allows employees to submit receipts and purchase details directly from their mobile phones, eliminating the need to save them for monthly expense reports. This capability simplifies documentation collection and expense tracking across various locations for finance teams of larger, multi-unit operators.

Connecting Financial Activity to Business Goals

The platform’s connectivity helps finance teams link day-to-day financial activities with broader business objectives. DeSocio emphasized that “project-level visibility” is a key issue for many brands, including his client who used NetSuite projects and wished to exclude irrelevant ones from spending workflows. The system also aids in managing invoices for contractors and events, ensuring proper coding and approvals. Early integration of this information into the process makes it easier to identify expenses charged to the wrong project, compare spending across different teams, or review upcoming renewals before payment.

With Ramp, all parties involved in a transaction are kept informed. Approvers can view the purpose, amount, and the specific location or project an expense is associated with. This context is then available in financial reporting, preventing the need to reconstruct transaction details weeks later.

“The person approving a purchase should be able to see the purpose, the amount and the location or project it serves,” DeSocio said. “Finance should then be able to see the same context in its reporting, rather than reverse-engineering a charge weeks later.”

Ramp reports tangible results for its clients. One multi-unit studio organization reportedly reduced its monthly close time by five days and reclaimed approximately 400 employee hours each month through expense simplification. Additionally, Ramp customers typically experience savings of 5% on their overall spend.