Ramp Becomes Go To Spend Platform as Firms Cut Manual Accounting

When Barry’s fitness studios saved 400 hours per month through automated expense reporting, the result was not additional headcount but a stark reckoning with what accountants actually do all day. The boutique chain is among more than 50,000 businesses now using Ramp, the spend management platform that reached a $32 billion valuation in November 2025, and its experience captures a broader transformation sweeping corporate finance departments. The question for accountants is no longer whether automation will arrive but what happens to their profession when it does.

The numbers tell a compelling story about adoption velocity. Ramp doubled its customer base to over 50,000 in the past year while revenue climbed from $500 million to above $1 billion. The platform now processes $55 billion in annualised payment volume, up from $10 billion in January 2023. Yet these figures obscure a more consequential shift: the wholesale transfer of routine accounting work from humans to algorithms.

Consider what this means in practice. Rustic Canyon, an eight-location California restaurant group, reclaimed five working days each month through automated workflows. The platform’s artificial intelligence made 26,146,619 decisions across over $10 billion in spend during October 2025 alone, while preventing 511,157 out-of-policy transactions that month and saving customers $290,981,801. These are not marginal productivity gains but fundamental changes in how accounting operations function.

The competitive landscape offers revealing context. While Ramp focuses relentlessly on automation and cost savings with its 1.5% cashback model, rival Brex took a different path that ended in strategic retreat. In June 2022, Brex abruptly exited the small business market, abandoning tens of thousands of customers with just two months’ notice. The company admitted it could not profitably serve both venture-backed startups and traditional small businesses, a strategic miscalculation that left the market segment open for competitors.

That episode illuminates why Ramp’s model has gained traction. Where Brex monetised primarily through interchange fees and offered category-based rewards points, Ramp positioned itself around operational efficiency from the outset. The contrast reflects differing views on what finance teams actually need. Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras told CNBC the company would “do a poor job for both” customer segments if it continued serving traditional small businesses alongside high-growth startups.

Industry analysts note the spend management software market is expanding rapidly, with valuations climbing from $23.36 billion in 2024 to a projected $56.30 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. That 11.7% compound annual growth rate reflects mounting pressure on finance departments to demonstrate measurable efficiency gains without proportional headcount increases.

For accounting professionals, the implications extend well beyond time savings. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report identifies accounting, bookkeeping and payroll clerk roles among the fastest-declining occupations globally. The report estimates that by 2030, the proportion of accounting tasks performed predominantly by humans will decline from 47% currently to 33%. These are not projections of distant disruption but descriptions of changes already underway.

The automation is granular and comprehensive. Ramp reports that 90% of transactions arrive in accounting systems already coded with the correct department and location. Receipt matching, policy enforcement and vendor management tasks that once required manual review now occur algorithmically before transactions reach human oversight. The platform integrates with NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, Workday Financials, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Oracle Fusion Cloud, enabling automated workflows across the primary enterprise resource planning systems accounting departments use.

The shift creates winners and losers within accounting departments. Stanford Graduate School of Business research published in 2024 found that accountants using generative AI can support more clients, close books faster and provide higher-quality service. Nearly half of surveyed accountants said AI tools helped them meet deadlines more reliably and improve accuracy. Yet the same research noted that bookkeeping activities, the foundational day-to-day tasks of recording and organising financial transactions, are where automation has taken deepest hold.

Ramp’s financial trajectory suggests the business model can support aggressive expansion. The company burned less than $2 million per month on average in 2024 while scaling rapidly, with underlying contribution profit growing 153% year over year. The efficiency stands in contrast to competitors who struggled with cost discipline. Brex, after its 2022 pivot away from small businesses, subsequently laid off 11% of its staff as market conditions tightened.

The pricing strategy has accelerated adoption. Ramp offers a free base tier with unlimited cards and core expense management, while its Plus plan costs $15 per user per month. The company achieved over 30% adoption of Plus among new customer cohorts, indicating customers find sufficient value in premium features to pay for them after experiencing the baseline offering. This freemium approach allows finance teams to trial the platform without budget approval battles, reducing friction in the sales process.

Integration capability matters significantly to accounting professionals evaluating these platforms. The ability to sync transaction-level details in real-time enables finance teams to close books substantially faster, with some customers reporting 8x improvements in month-end close speed. For accountants traditionally measured on the speed and accuracy of their closes, this represents a fundamental shift in how productivity gets assessed.

The career implications remain contested. Some industry observers argue automation will free accountants to focus on analysis and strategic planning rather than data entry and reconciliation. The Texas Society of CPAs notes that while certain traditional roles may diminish, overall demand will increase for accountants capable of leveraging intelligent systems for enhanced decision-making, risk management and strategic insights.

Yet the evidence for this transition remains thin. Research from Gartner indicates that 58% of finance teams were using AI in 2024, up sharply from the prior year, with automation moving from experimentation to daily operations. Leading accounts payable suites report time savings of up to 80% on invoice processing through intelligent extraction and duplicate flagging. When software eliminates 80% of the time required for a task, the outcome is rarely equivalent work on higher-value activities but rather the same work with fewer people.

The consolidation of finance functions onto unified platforms like Ramp has particular resonance for mid-market teams. These departments typically juggle 15 to 20 different tools for daily operations, creating integration headaches and data reconciliation challenges. The pitch of a single platform handling cards, bill payments, travel booking and expense management addresses a genuine pain point.

Ramp has moved aggressively to capture the advisory narrative. CEO Eric Glyman stated that companies switching to the platform spend 5% less and grow 12% faster on average. These statistics, provided by the company itself, deserve scrutiny. Attribution is notoriously difficult in corporate performance metrics, and companies implementing new financial controls are often those already focused on operational efficiency. Whether Ramp drives these improvements or merely correlates with them is unclear.

The broader market dynamics suggest consolidation will intensify. SAP Concur captured 49.6% of travel and expense revenue in 2024 according to Mordor Intelligence, leveraging decade-long integrations with enterprise resource planning systems. Coupa, Oracle NetSuite and Workday position full spend-management suites bundling procurement, supplier risk and expense modules. Challenger brands like Ramp, Brex and Navan differentiate through corporate cards that issue virtual numbers instantly and feed enriched metadata back into automated reconciliation engines.

For accounting professionals navigating this transition, the strategic question concerns which skills retain value. Technical proficiency with specific platforms becomes table stakes rather than differentiator. Data analysis capabilities, the ability to extract insights from automated systems rather than manually process transactions, gains importance. Communication skills to translate financial information for non-experts and provide strategic input become more critical.

The regulatory and compliance dimension offers some protection for human judgement. Audit requirements, tax strategy and valuation work largely remain human-led, though AI tools are beginning to assist with document synthesis and anomaly detection. The CPA Journal notes AI can help accountants sift through lengthy documents and historical data quickly, providing fresh perspectives that enhance creative and critical thinking. Yet these are support functions rather than replacements, at least for now.

The uncomfortable reality is that spend management automation represents just one vector of change affecting accounting work. Invoice processing, bank reconciliation, expense categorisation, receipt matching and transaction coding are being automated simultaneously. The cumulative effect reshapes the profession more dramatically than any single technology. When Barry’s fitness studios regain 400 hours monthly, those hours represent work that previously employed people and now employs software.

The path forward for individual accountants likely involves constant adaptation. As Karbon research suggests, firms leveraging automation save 3.2 hours per week per employee simply by automatically chasing clients for information. Accountants who position themselves as managers of automated systems rather than performers of manual tasks may fare better. Those who cannot or will not make that transition face diminishing opportunity.

The broader question for the profession concerns whether enough strategic, analytical and advisory work exists to absorb accountants displaced from transaction processing. Finance departments are being asked to accomplish more with static or reduced headcounts in an environment where overhead scrutiny has intensified. The optimistic scenario where automation frees people for higher-value work assumes organisations will pay for that higher-value work at current staffing levels. The pessimistic scenario sees headcount reductions matching productivity gains.

The coming years will clarify whether the World Economic Forum’s projections prove accurate. If accounting work performed by humans declines from 47% to 33% by 2030 as forecast, the profession will look substantially different from its historical form. The question is not whether automation will reshape accounting but what kind of accounting profession emerges on the other side of that transformation.