How Numeral cut month-end close time by 80% switching from Ramp to Brex
Industry
Financial services
Company size
120 employees
Brex products used
Business banking, Corporate cards, Expense management, Travel
Grow your cash with Brex.
About Numeral
Making sales tax easy for scaling companies
Numeral is the fastest, most accurate way to stay compliant with U.S. sales tax and global VAT/GST. Trusted by 2,000+ businesses, including Eight Sleep, Ridge, and Manus, Numeral’s AI-native platform keeps customers compliant wherever they sell, with calculations, registrations, filings, and ongoing compliance support in 100+ countries.
The venture-backed startup has raised more than $60M in funding from investors including Y Combinator, Benchmark, and Mayfield. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company has recently established its global presence in the UK.
Challenges
Basic spend controls couldn't keep up with hypergrowth
When Hudson Bova joined Numeral as Head of Finance, he inherited a system that worked for an early-stage startup but couldn't support the company's current growth trajectory. "The controls and the spend policies that you have in place at the seed and Series A aren't necessarily the right policies for when you are Series B or a later stage company," he explains.
The company was using Ramp for cards and spend management while keeping their banking at a separate provider, creating a fragmented financial operation. "Our Ramp setup was a bifurcated, complex web of policies that complicated how money moved," Hudson says. Despite being marketed as a one-stop platform, the setup on Ramp still meant logging into multiple platforms to get a complete picture of the company's finances.
As Numeral continued to grow, Ramp's limitations became more apparent. "Ramp felt designed around card management but not really spend management," Hudson notes. The platform lacked the depth needed for sophisticated approval chains, department-level spend visibility, and deep integrations with their ERP and HRIS systems.
The limitations of Ramp showed up most clearly during month-end close. "We were left spending hours and hours during the month-end close reconciling, categorizing spend data," Hudson explains. Policy exceptions felt like the norm, requiring manual intervention and slowing down the finance team's work.
Solution
Brex’s all-in-one platform with deep policy enforcement and amazing rewards
Hudson saw an opportunity for a fresh start. "I wanted a clean platform that I knew we could grow into, not out of." he says. After evaluating options, Brex stood out for its comprehensive spend management, card management, and business banking platform all rolled into one.
The decision came down to getting everything in one place. “Brex is a truly all-in-one platform for us. We get treasury management, travel, banking, credit cards, and spend management that actually controls spend," Hudson explains. "It’s a one-stop shop to manage our financial operations."
Beyond consolidation, Brex offered deeper product capabilities. "I think the Brex spend management product is deeper than Ramp," Hudson notes. The platform provided the sophisticated approval chains and policy enforcement that Numeral needed as they scaled.
And, the sales experience only reinforced the decision. "There are some teams that make you feel like you're being sold to. With Brex, it felt like they were just trying to understand what you need, and develop a solution around that,” says Hudson. Brex is also hyper competitive on points and rewards and cash back for our card."
Impact
Automated finances and a national billboard campaign
The migration to Brex has transformed Numeral's financial operations. Most dramatically, Hudson is cutting month-end close down to just 2-3 hours on Brex, all the way down from 10-12 hours on Ramp, with better policy adherence. That's an 80% reduction in time spent on reconciliation and categorization compared to Ramp.
“We spent 10-12 hours on month-end close on Ramp. With Brex's categorization engine, we can get that down to 2-3 hours.”
— Hudson Bova, VP of Finance
The unified platform eliminated the complexity of managing finances across multiple systems. "It’s nice to have everything under one umbrella so I can see everything in one place," Hudson explains. The team now has complete visibility across banking, cards, and spend management without switching between platforms.
And the user experience improvements extend beyond visibility. "The UX and reporting functionality on Brex is so much easier to navigate than Ramp, and saves us at least 1 hour every week." Hudson notes. "On the spend management and the policy implementation side, it is just much more intuitive."
Looking ahead, Brex's international capabilities position Numeral for continued growth. "When we're thinking about a vendor as we expand globally, we want to be able to grow with them. And when I think about Brex's capabilities, I know they’ll be able to keep up," Hudson says.
Ready to see how Brex can streamline your financial operations? Sign up for Brex today and discover how our integrated platform can eliminate the complexity of managing multiple financial tools while delivering measurable time and cost savings.
