How TaskHuman built their runway with Ramp

Following its Series B fundraise, TaskHuman has entered a phase of hypergrowth. The company has more than doubled its headcount and now has over 100 FTEs. Amid this period, TaskHuman didn’t have a mature financial system that reflected the seriousness of its mission. 

“We were growing too fast and needed a solution that could match that scale,” explains TaskHuman Controller Matthew Ferguson. “We used Expensify, we had corporate cards everywhere, reimbursements everywhere. What we needed was capital efficiency, spend monitoring, and overarching insight and awareness of our spend.” 

Without such a system, Matthew found himself allocating material time to tedious manual tasks. “I was spending hours going through expense reports and manually uploading them to the GL, checking off what was submitted and what wasn't at month end,” he says. “I hated it. There were so many other important things to do beyond approving expenses and setting up corporate cards.” 

Implementing a more sophisticated expense management system wasn’t just good for Matthew’s daily work—it was necessary for the future success of the business. “In the current environment, companies aren’t getting as much funding from private equity and venture capital firms,” says Matthew. “To really sell your story and get that funding, you must demonstrate efficient use of capital and proceeds, because everyone’s going to ask: what’s your runway? Where are you spending? How much?”

TaskHuman needed the ability to provide a clear, data-backed answer to that question.

Matthew worked with Ramp to design a bespoke expense management and coding system that worked for him and for TaskHuman. “It was a bit of work in the beginning to set up, but once it was done, it was ‘set it and forget it,’” he says. 

TaskHuman set up a card for each vendor and each initiative, including the company’s work from home stipend. “We’ve been issuing virtual cards to control spend,” says Matthew. “People used to go over the limit, we were stuck. Things like that, which we were not thinking of when we decided to onboard Ramp, have been handy .” With Ramp, Matthew was able to set up a tailored process and approval workflow, which makes his job easier and positions the company well for its upcoming audit.

Since the team implemented Ramp, it has become a one-stop shop for expense management. Matthew appreciated that Ramp allows him to drill down into the data insights he and his management really need. “We track vendor, we track department, we track location,” he explains. “We can break it down in real-time, we can track anything we want.”

Ramp removes the friction from Matthew’s job. “I’ve pretty much seen or used everything that’s out there,” says Matthew. “Everything does something Ramp does, but nothing does everything Ramp does. One of my favorite things about Ramp is the enhanced internal controls it provides across procurement, purchasing, and treasury. Ramp is a one-stop shop for all three functions.”

Implementing Ramp has resulted in significant time savings for Matthew, which has had positive ramifications for him and the company at large. 

“Closing the books is the most important thing at month end,” says Matthew. “We need to do that as fast as possible so we can produce ad hoc reports, and financial statements to share with management and investors.” With Ramp, TaskHuman has been able to cut its 15-day close process down to 2-3 days. 

Ramp doesn’t just expedite processes at month end—it also provides granular, real-time insights throughout the month. Matthew is able to see what’s pending at any given moment. “That enhanced level of insight allows you to be proactive and more efficient with your runway. I think it’s hard sometimes for early-stage companies to truly understand what it costs to run the business. Ramp makes it easy. You can say: here is what we spent, here are the costs essential to running the business, this is what we saved, and I can prove it.”

Matthew has been able to use the insights gleaned from Ramp to be more proactive about cost savings for the company. “I got in there and saw the nitty gritty of all these recurring expenses ,” he says. “We saw multiple people with the same recurring subscriptions, everyone was paying a separate price. With Ramp, you are able to consolidate the recurring software and tools used by multiple departments into one invoice and one payment. ” Those insights and that consolidation enabled TaskHuman to become more efficient with its spend and reduce costs where it could.

Ultimately, one of the greatest savings Matthew has realized from using Ramp is time. “Our teams run lean here at TaskHuman. There is always something to do, time is a constraint, you must be efficient,” he says. “Automating with Ramp gives me time back to focus on other areas of the business.” Ramp has enabled Matthew to shift his attention to higher-value tasks, all without adding to the finance team’s headcount. 

“This is innovative stuff,” he says. “I was a skeptic at first that it could be this easy, but Ramp really blew me away. This is the future. I think everyone will be on Ramp in the next 10 years.”