How Ramp Simplifies Finance for Growing Fitness Brands

Ramp unifies spending, payments and accounting for multi-unit brands, helping operators eliminate busywork, gain financial clarity and scale more efficiently

Charlie DeSocio, enterprise account executive at Ramp, the AI-powered finance platform, understood where his client was coming from when they first met. While thrilled with their recent growth, part of the team was frustrated. Different locations were making different purchases and leveraging various payment tools in the process. A few were even using different currencies. The brand was performing well, but its approach to managing spend had become increasingly disparate and difficult to oversee. 

“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.”

It’s a familiar problem across the industry: spending increases at the local level, while the team overseeing it remains the same size.

“One gym is buying equipment, another is paying for repairs and someone else is booking travel or working with contractors,” DeSocio went on. “By the time those transactions reach headquarters, the team needs to know who approved them, which location or project they belong to and how they should appear in the books. If that information lives across several tools, people spend too much time chasing it down.”

This is precisely why Ramp was built. It’s a platform that ties everything together. In doing so, Ramp helps partner brands remove those organizational and financial hindrances, see their operation more clearly and continue to grow without restriction. 

The Ramp Difference 

Ramp connects purchasing, approvals, payments and accounting in one platform, automating the steps between them so finance teams don’t have to manually process and track each transaction. 

“Ramp can capture invoice details, create a bill for review, and route it through the right approval process based on the company’s policies,” DeSocio explained. “From there, Ramp can match the bill to a purchase order when applicable and sync the relevant accounting data to NetSuite.”

In doing so, Ramp eliminates reconciliation, improves spend visibility and frees up staff to dedicate more time to pressing initiatives. 

“The day-to-day opportunity is to eliminate repetitive, manual work,” DeSocio went on. “Take an invoice for an equipment purchase: someone has to capture the details, assign the right project and department, route it for approval, pay it and record it in the accounting system. When those steps happen across separate systems, finance teams spend too much time moving information from one place to another. Automation can handle more of that work, giving teams more time to focus on exceptions that need their attention and higher-value, strategic work.”

Beyond spend at the corporate level, for fitness studios where employees may be making purchases across multiple locations and spending much of their day away from a desk, keeping track of receipts can quickly become a burden. Ramp allows employees to submit receipts and purchase details directly from their phones, rather than saving them up for a monthly expense report. For larger, multi-unit operators, that can make it easier for finance teams to collect documentation and keep track of spending across locations.

A Complete Transactional Picture 

That connectivity helps finance teams connect the dots between day-to-day financial activity and the broader business. DeSocio called “project-level visibility” a “main issue” he often sees with brands. He recalls that being true for his aforementioned client as well. 

“Their corporate team used NetSuite projects and wanted to keep irrelevant or inactive projects out of the spending workflow,” DeSocio said. “They also had invoices connected to contractors and events that needed the right coding and approvals. Getting that information into the process earlier makes it easier to spot an expense charged to the wrong project, compare spending across teams or question a renewal before it gets paid.”

This way, everyone is fully informed at every phase of a transaction. 

“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.”

Tangible Impacts

Ramp reports that one of theirmulti-unit studio organizations has cut five days from its monthly close and given employees roughly 400 hours back each month by simplifying expenses. Ramp’s customers on average see savings of 5%

“We at Ramp are obsessed with savings — time and money,” DeScoio added.